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A Bayesian approach to the g-formula.

ABSTRACT: Epidemiologists often wish to estimate quantities that are easy to communicate and correspond to the results of realistic public health interventions. Methods from causal inference can answer these questions. We adopt the language of potential outcomes under Rubin's original Bayesian framework and show that the parametric g-formula is easily amenable to a Bayesian approach. We show that the frequentist properties of the Bayesian g-formula suggest it improves the accuracy of estimates of causal effects in small samples or when data are sparse. We demonstrate an approach to estimate the effect of environmental tobacco smoke on body mass index among children aged 4-9 years who were enrolled in a longitudinal birth cohort in New York, USA. We provide an algorithm and supply SAS and Stan code that can be adopted to implement this computational approach more generally.

SUBMITTER: Keil AP

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5790647 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A Bayesian approach to the g-formula.

Keil Alexander P AP Daza Eric J EJ Engel Stephanie M SM Buckley Jessie P JP Edwards Jessie K JK

Statistical methods in medical research 20170302 10

Epidemiologists often wish to estimate quantities that are easy to communicate and correspond to the results of realistic public health interventions. Methods from causal inference can answer these questions. We adopt the language of potential outcomes under Rubin's original Bayesian framework and show that the parametric g-formula is easily amenable to a Bayesian approach. We show that the frequentist properties of the Bayesian g-formula suggest it improves the accuracy of estimates of causal e ...[more]

PMID: 29298607

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Project description:Linear-bilinear models, especially the additive main effects and multiplicative interaction (AMMI) model, are widely applicable to genotype-by-environment interaction (GEI) studies in plant breeding programs. These models allow a parsimonious modeling of GE interactions, retaining a small number of principal components in the analysis. However, one aspect of the AMMI model that is still debated is the selection criteria for determining the number of multiplicative terms required to describe the GE interaction pattern. Shrinkage estimators have been proposed as selection criteria for the GE interaction components. In this study, a Bayesian approach was combined with the AMMI model with shrinkage estimators for the principal components. A total of 55 maize genotypes were evaluated in nine different environments using a complete blocks design with three replicates. The results show that the traditional Bayesian AMMI model produces low shrinkage of singular values but avoids the usual pitfalls in determining the credible intervals in the biplot. On the other hand, Bayesian shrinkage AMMI models have difficulty with the credible interval for model parameters, but produce stronger shrinkage of the principal components, converging to GE matrices that have more shrinkage than those obtained using mixed models. This characteristic allowed more parsimonious models to be chosen, and resulted in models being selected that were similar to those obtained by the Cornelius F-test (α = 0.05) in traditional AMMI models and cross validation based on leave-one-out. This characteristic allowed more parsimonious models to be chosen and more GEI pattern retained on the first two components. The resulting model chosen by posterior distribution of singular value was also similar to those produced by the cross-validation approach in traditional AMMI models. Our method enables the estimation of credible interval for AMMI biplot plus the choice of AMMI model based on direct posterior distribution retaining more GEI pattern in the first components and discarding noise without Gaussian assumption as requested in F-based tests or deal with parametric problems as observed in traditional AMMI shrinkage method.

Dataset Information

A Bayesian approach to the g-formula.

Publications

A Bayesian approach to the g-formula.

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