CAUSAL INFERENCE FROM OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES WITH CLUSTERED INTERFERENCE, WITH APPLICATION TO A CHOLERA VACCINE STUDY.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the population-level effects of vaccines has important public health policy implications. Inferring vaccine effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to vaccine (i.e., treatment). Observational studies of infectious diseases present the additional challenge that vaccinating one participant may affect another participant's outcome, i.e., there may be interference. In this paper recent approaches to defining vaccine effects in the presence of interference are considered, and new causal estimands designed specifically for use with observational studies are proposed. Previously defined estimands target counterfactual scenarios in which individuals independently choose to be vaccinated with equal probability. However, in settings wh

SUBMITTER: Barkley BG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12509460 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature