Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Estimating Population Treatment Effects From A Survey Sub-Sample, Kara E. Rudolph, Ivan Diaz, Michael Rosenblum, Elizabeth A. Stuart

Johns Hopkins University, Dept. of Biostatistics Working Papers

We consider the problem of estimating an average treatment effect for a target population from a survey sub-sample. Our motivating example is generalizing a treatment effect estimated in a sub-sample of the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement to the population of U.S. adolescents. To address this problem, we evaluate easy-to-implement methods that account for both non-random treatment assignment and a non-random two-stage selection mechanism. We compare the performance of a Horvitz-Thompson estimator using inverse probability weighting (IPW) and two double robust estimators in a variety of scenarios. We demonstrate that the two double robust estimators generally outperform IPW in …