Multi-source analyses of average treatment effects with failure time outcomes

Lan Wen (), Jon A. Steingrimsson, Sarah E. Robertson and Issa J. Dahabreh
Additional contact information
Lan Wen: University of Waterloo
Jon A. Steingrimsson: Brown University
Sarah E. Robertson: Harvard University
Issa J. Dahabreh: Harvard University

Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data, 2025, vol. 31, issue 4, No 7, 869-897

Abstract: Abstract Analyses of multi-source data, such as data from multi-center randomized trials, individual participant data meta-analyses, or pooled analyses of observational studies, combine information to estimate an overall average treatment effect. However, if average treatment effects vary across data sources, commonly used approaches for multi-source analyses may not have a clear causal interpretation with respect to a target population of interest. In this paper, we provide identification and estimation of average treatment effects in a target population underlying one of the data sources in a point treatment setting for failure time outcomes potentially subject to right-censoring. We do not assume the absence of effect heterogeneity and hence our results are valid, under certain assumptions, when average treatment effects vary across data sources. We derive the efficient influence functions for source-specific average treatment effects using multi-source data under two different sets of assumptions, and propose a novel doubly robust estimator for our estimand. We evaluate the finite-sample performance of our estimator in simulation studies, and apply our methods to data from the HALT-C multi-center trials.

Keywords: Causal inference; Censored data; Double robustness; Estimands; Survival analysis; Transportability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10985-025-09663-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:lifeda:v:31:y:2025:i:4:d:10.1007_s10985-025-09663-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10985

DOI: 10.1007/s10985-025-09663-0

Access Statistics for this article

Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data is currently edited by Mei-Ling Ting Lee

More articles in Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().