Xiang Meng (Applied Stats)

Today's Speaker

Xiang Meng (Harvard)

Abstract

Understanding the causal effects of time-varying treatments is critical in many domains, such as evaluating the impact of heart transplants on patient outcomes. Physicians face a challenge in determining whether transplants significantly improve patients' health and longevity, particularly when the timing of transplants varies across individuals. This timing variability, if not properly accounted for, can introduce bias and lead to misleading conclusions. Inspired by this problem, we propose a novel framework, Time-Varying Causal Survival Learning (TV-CSL), which extends the staggered adoption framework from econometrics to time-to-event variables. By leveraging techniques from survival analysis, we derive an efficient causal estimator that accommodates the dynamic nature of treatments. Additionally, we incorporate double machine learning methods to handle complex, non-linear relationships between covariates and outcomes, improving the estimator’s efficiency. Simulation results show that our estimator outperforms traditional methods by reducing bias and offering theoretical guarantees for improved efficiency.

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.

All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.