The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by METANET, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]metanet.ch.

AIPW: Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting

Project Status: Active – The project has reached a stable, usable state and is being actively developed. Codecov test coverage Travis build status R build status

Contributors: Yongqi Zhong, Ashley Naimi, Gabriel Conzuelo, Edward Kennedy

Augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW) is a doubly robust estimator for causal inference. The AIPW package is designed for estimating the average treatment effect of a binary exposure on risk difference (RD), risk ratio (RR) and odds ratio (OR) scales with user-defined stacked machine learning algorithms (SuperLearner or sl3). Users need to examine causal assumptions (e.g., consistency) before using this package.

If you find this package is helpful, please consider to cite:

@article{zhong_aipw_2021,
  author = "Zhong, Y., Kennedy, E.H., Bodnar, L.M., Naimi, A.I. ",
  title = "AIPW: An R Package for Augmented Inverse Probability Weighted Estimation of Average Causal Effects",
  year = {2021},
  note = "In Press",
  journal = "American Journal of Epidemiology"
}

* CRAN version only supports SuperLearner and tmle. Please install the Github version (master branch) to use sl3 and tmle3.

Contents:

Installation

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("yqzhong7/AIPW")

Example

Setup example data

set.seed(888)
data("eager_sim_obs")
outcome <- eager_sim_obs$sim_A
exposure <- eager_sim_obs$sim_Y
#covariates for both outcome model (Q) and exposure model (g)
covariates <- as.matrix(eager_sim_obs[-1:-2])

# covariates <- c(rbinom(N,1,0.4)) #a vector of a single covariate is also supported

One line version (AIPW class: method chaining from R6class)

library(AIPW)
library(SuperLearner)
#> Loading required package: nnls
#> Super Learner
#> Version: 2.0-26
#> Package created on 2019-10-27
library(ggplot2)
AIPW_SL <- AIPW$new(Y = outcome,
                    A = exposure,
                    W = covariates, 
                    Q.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    g.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    k_split = 3,
                    verbose=FALSE)$
  fit()$
  #Default truncation is set to 0.025; using 0.25 here is for illustrative purposes and not recommended
  summary(g.bound = 0.25)$ 
  plot.p_score()$
  plot.ip_weights()

To see the results, set verbose = TRUE(default) or:

print(AIPW_SL$result, digits = 2)
#>                  Estimate    SE 95% LCL 95% UCL   N
#> Risk of exposure     0.68 0.053  0.5765    0.78  78
#> Risk of control      0.54 0.046  0.4458    0.63 122
#> Risk Difference      0.14 0.070  0.0059    0.28 200
#> Risk Ratio           1.27 0.116  1.0099    1.59 200
#> Odds Ratio           1.84 0.307  1.0084    3.36 200

To obtain average treatment effect among the treated/controls (ATT/ATC), statified_fit() must be used:

AIPW_SL_att <- AIPW$new(Y = outcome,
                    A = exposure,
                    W = covariates, 
                    Q.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    g.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    k_split = 3,
                    verbose=T)
suppressWarnings({
  AIPW_SL_att$stratified_fit()$summary()
})
#> Done!
#>                     Estimate     SE  95% LCL 95% UCL   N
#> Risk of exposure       0.672 0.0555  0.56310   0.781  78
#> Risk of control        0.546 0.0462  0.45537   0.637 122
#> Risk Difference        0.126 0.0724 -0.01581   0.268 200
#> Risk Ratio             1.231 0.1187  0.97537   1.553 200
#> Odds Ratio             1.704 0.3144  0.91994   3.155 200
#> ATT Risk Difference    0.125 0.0624  0.00262   0.247 200
#> ATC Risk Difference    0.121 0.1058 -0.08662   0.328 200

You can also use the aipw_wrapper() to wrap new(), fit() and summary() together (also support method chaining):

AIPW_SL <- aipw_wrapper(Y = outcome,
                        A = exposure,
                        W = covariates, 
                        Q.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                        g.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                        k_split = 3,
                        verbose=TRUE,
                        stratified_fit=F)$plot.p_score()$plot.ip_weights()

Parallelization with future.apply and progress bar with progressr

In default setting, the AIPW$fit() method will be run sequentially. The current version of AIPW package supports parallel processing implemented by future.apply package under the future framework. Simply use future::plan() to enable parallelization and set.seed() to take care of the random number generation (RNG) problem:

###Additional steps for parallel processing###
# install.packages("future.apply")
library(future.apply)
#> Loading required package: future
future::plan(multiprocess, workers=2, gc=T)
#> Warning: [ONE-TIME WARNING] Forked processing ('multicore') is disabled
#> in future (>= 1.13.0) when running R from RStudio, because it is
#> considered unstable. Because of this, plan("multicore") will fall
#> back to plan("sequential"), and plan("multiprocess") will fall back to
#> plan("multisession") - not plan("multicore") as in the past. For more details,
#> how to control forked processing or not, and how to silence this warning in
#> future R sessions, see ?future::supportsMulticore
set.seed(888)

###Same procedure for AIPW as described above###
AIPW_SL <- AIPW$new(Y = outcome,
                    A = exposure,
                    W = covariates, 
                    Q.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    g.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    k_split = 3,
                    verbose=TRUE)$fit()$summary()
#> Done!
#>                  Estimate     SE  95% LCL 95% UCL   N
#> Risk of exposure    0.676 0.0546  0.56913   0.783  78
#> Risk of control     0.538 0.0462  0.44705   0.628 122
#> Risk Difference     0.139 0.0714 -0.00144   0.279 200
#> Risk Ratio          1.258 0.1177  0.99869   1.584 200
#> Odds Ratio          1.796 0.3104  0.97745   3.300 200

Progress bar that supports parallel processing is available in the AIPW$fit() method through the API from progressr package:

library(progressr)
#define the type of progress bar
handlers("progress")
#reporting through progressr::with_progress() which is embedded in the AIPW$fit() method
with_progress(
  AIPW_SL <- AIPW$new(Y = outcome,
                    A = exposure,
                    W = covariates, 
                    Q.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    g.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                    k_split = 3,
                    verbose=FALSE)$fit()$summary()
)
#also available for the wrapper
with_progress(
  AIPW_SL <- aipw_wrapper(Y = outcome,
                        A = exposure,
                        W = covariates, 
                        Q.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                        g.SL.library = c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                        k_split = 3,
                        verbose=FALSE)
)

Use tmle fitted object as input (AIPW_tmle class)

AIPW_tmle class is designed for using tmle fitted object as input

tmle

require(tmle)
#> Loading required package: tmle
#> Loading required package: glmnet
#> Loading required package: Matrix
#> Loaded glmnet 4.0
#> Welcome to the tmle package, version 1.4.0.1
#> 
#> Use tmleNews() to see details on changes and bug fixes
require(SuperLearner)
tmle_fit <- tmle(Y = outcome, A = exposure,W = covariates,
                 Q.SL.library=c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                 g.SL.library=c("SL.mean","SL.glm"),
                 family="binomial")
tmle_fit
#>  Additive Effect
#>    Parameter Estimate:  0.14389
#>    Estimated Variance:  0.0048764
#>               p-value:  0.039348
#>     95% Conf Interval: (0.0070199, 0.28076) 
#> 
#>  Additive Effect among the Treated
#>    Parameter Estimate:  0.14419
#>    Estimated Variance:  0.0048673
#>               p-value:  0.038752
#>     95% Conf Interval: (0.0074516, 0.28093) 
#> 
#>  Additive Effect among the Controls
#>    Parameter Estimate:  0.14318
#>    Estimated Variance:  0.0048874
#>               p-value:  0.040552
#>     95% Conf Interval: (0.0061575, 0.2802) 
#> 
#>  Relative Risk
#>    Parameter Estimate:  1.2696
#>               p-value:  0.039067
#>     95% Conf Interval: (1.012, 1.5927) 
#> 
#>               log(RR):  0.23871
#>     variance(log(RR)):  0.013383 
#> 
#>  Odds Ratio
#>    Parameter Estimate:  1.8362
#>               p-value:  0.045369
#>     95% Conf Interval: (1.0126, 3.3297) 
#> 
#>               log(OR):  0.6077
#>     variance(log(OR)):  0.092213
#extract fitted tmle object to AIPW
AIPW_tmle$
  new(A=exposure,Y=outcome,tmle_fit = tmle_fit,verbose = TRUE)$
  summary(g.bound=0.025)
#> Cross-fitting is supported only within the outcome model from a fitted tmle object (with cvQinit = TRUE)
#>                  Estimate     SE 95% LCL 95% UCL   N
#> Risk of exposure    0.678 0.0529 0.57380   0.781  78
#> Risk of control     0.534 0.0455 0.44450   0.623 122
#> Risk Difference     0.144 0.0698 0.00702   0.281 200
#> Risk Ratio          1.270 0.1157 1.01198   1.593 200
#> Odds Ratio          1.836 0.3037 1.01244   3.330 200

References:

Robins JM, Rotnitzky A (1995). Semiparametric efficiency in multivariate regression models with missing data. Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Chernozhukov V, Chetverikov V, Demirer M, et al (2018). Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters. The Econometrics Journal.

Kennedy EH, Sjolander A, Small DS (2015). Semiparametric causal inference in matched cohort studies. Biometrika.

Pearl, J., 2009. Causality. Cambridge university press.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.