Assignment-Control Plots: A Visual Companion for Causal Inference Study Design

Rachael C. Aikens and Michael Baiocchi

The American Statistician, 2023, vol. 77, issue 1, 72-84

Abstract: An important step for any causal inference study design is understanding the distribution of the subjects in terms of measured baseline covariates. However, not all baseline variation is equally important. We propose a set of visualizations that reduce the space of measured covariates into two components of baseline variation important to the design of an observational causal inference study: a propensity score summarizing baseline variation associated with treatment assignment and a prognostic score summarizing baseline variation associated with the untreated potential outcome. These assignment-control plots and variations thereof visualize study design tradeoffs and illustrate core methodological concepts in causal inference. As a practical demonstration, we apply assignment-control plots to a hypothetical study of cardiothoracic surgery. To demonstrate how these plots can be used to illustrate nuanced concepts, we use them to visualize unmeasured confounding and to consider the relationship between propensity scores and instrumental variables. While the family of visualization tools for studies of causality is relatively sparse, simple visual tools can be an asset to education, application, and methods development.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00031305.2022.2051605 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:amstat:v:77:y:2023:i:1:p:72-84

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/UTAS20

DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2022.2051605

Access Statistics for this article

The American Statistician is currently edited by Eric Sampson

More articles in The American Statistician from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().