ESTIMATING PERSON‐CENTERED TREATMENT (PeT) EFFECTS USING INSTRUMENTAL VARIABLES: AN APPLICATION TO EVALUATING PROSTATE CANCER TREATMENTS
基于局部工具变量方法，估计以人为中心的治疗效果，该效果根据个人特征和未观测特征的条件分布进行个性化，并应用于前列腺癌治疗对生存和费用的影响分析。
SUMMARY This paper builds on the methods of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to estimate person‐centered treatment (PeT) effects that are conditioned on the person's observed characteristics and averaged over the potential conditional distribution of unobserved characteristics that lead them to their observed treatment choices. PeT effects are more individualized than conditional treatment effects from a randomized setting with the same observed characteristics. PeT effects can be easily aggregated to construct any of the mean treatment effect parameters and, more importantly, are well suited to comprehend individual‐level treatment effect heterogeneity. The paper presents the theory behind PeT effects, and applies it to study the variation in individual‐level comparative effects of prostate cancer treatments on overall survival and costs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.