Issa J. Dahabreh

Piersilvio De Bartolomeis, Javier Abad, Guanbo Wang et al. · eth-zurich

Randomized experiments are the preferred approach for evaluating the effects of interventions, but they are costly and often yield estimates with substantial uncertainty. On the other hand, in silico experiments leveraging foundation models offer a cost-effective alternative that can potentially attain higher statistical precision. However, the benefits of in silico experiments come with a significant risk: statistical inferences are not valid if the models fail to accurately predict experimental responses to interventions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates the predictions from multiple foundation models with experimental data while preserving valid statistical inference. Our estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal, with asymptotic variance no larger than the standard estimator based on experimental data alone. Importantly, these statistical properties hold even when model predictions are arbitrarily biased. Empirical results across several randomized experiments show that our estimator offers substantial precision gains, equivalent to a reduction of up to 20% in the sample size needed to match the same precision as the standard estimator based on experimental data alone.

Rickard Karlsson, Piersilvio De Bartolomeis, Issa J. Dahabreh et al. · eth-zurich

Randomized trials are typically designed to detect average treatment effects but often lack the statistical power to uncover individual-level treatment effect heterogeneity, limiting their value for personalized decision-making. To address this, we propose the QR-learner, a model-agnostic learner that estimates conditional average treatment effects (CATE) within the trial population by leveraging external data from other trials or observational studies. The proposed method is robust: it can reduce the mean squared error relative to a trial-only CATE learner, and is guaranteed to recover the true CATE even when the external data are not aligned with the trial. Moreover, we introduce a procedure that combines the QR-learner with a trial-only CATE learner and show that it asymptotically matches or exceeds both component learners in terms of mean squared error. We examine the performance of our approach in simulation studies and apply the methods to a real-world dataset, demonstrating improvements in both CATE estimation and statistical power for detecting heterogeneous effects.

Jiabei Yang, Issa J. Dahabreh, Jon A. Steingrimsson

We propose Causal Interaction Trees for identifying subgroups of participants that have enhanced treatment effects using observational data. We extend the Classification and Regression Tree algorithm by using splitting criteria that focus on maximizing between-group treatment effect heterogeneity based on subgroup-specific treatment effect estimators to dictate decision-making in the algorithm. We derive properties of three subgroup-specific treatment effect estimators that account for the observational nature of the data -- inverse probability weighting, g-formula and doubly robust estimators. We study the performance of the proposed algorithms using simulations and implement the algorithms in an observational study that evaluates the effectiveness of right heart catheterization on critically ill patients.