مقایسهٔ روش‌ها

	Negative Control Outcome Design	Marginal Structural Model (IPTW)
حوزه	Social Epidemiology	Social Epidemiology
خانواده	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
سال پیدایش	2010	2000
پدیدآور	Marc Lipsitch, Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen & Ted Cohen; Xu Shi & Wang Miao	James M. Robins, Miguel A. Hernán & Babette Brumback
نوع	Falsification-and-correction pipeline for unmeasured confounding	Reweighting pipeline for time-varying confounding affected by prior treatment
منبع بنیادین	Lipsitch, M., Tchetgen Tchetgen, E., & Cohen, T. (2010). Negative Controls: A Tool for Detecting Confounding and Bias in Observational Studies. Epidemiology, 21(3), 383-388.	Robins, J. M., Hernán, M. A., & Brumback, B. (2000). Marginal structural models and causal inference in epidemiology. Epidemiology, 11(5), 550-560.
نام‌های دیگر	Negative Controls, Negative Control Outcome, Negative Control Exposure, Falsification Endpoint Analysis	MSM with IPTW, Inverse-Probability-of-Treatment-Weighted Marginal Structural Model, IPTW Marginal Structural Model, Robins Marginal Structural Model
مرتبط	4	3
خلاصه	The negative control design uses a deliberately chosen outcome (or exposure) that cannot plausibly be caused by the exposure under study, yet is subject to the same unmeasured confounding, selection, or measurement processes as the real research question. If the exposure appears to 'affect' something it cannot possibly affect, that spurious association is a signature of residual bias. Lipsitch, Tchetgen Tchetgen, and Cohen formalized this falsification logic for epidemiology in 2010, specifying the conditions a valid negative control must satisfy. Shi, Miao, and Tchetgen Tchetgen's 2020 review extended the idea from detection toward correction, showing how pairs of negative control variables underpin proximal causal inference, which can recover an unbiased effect estimate even when the confounder is never measured.	Marginal structural models, introduced by Robins, Hernán, and Brumback in 2000, are causal models for the mean of a counterfactual outcome under a treatment regime, estimated by inverse-probability-of-treatment weighting. They solve the same problem as the g-formula — estimating the effect of a time-varying exposure when time-varying confounders are themselves affected by prior treatment — but through a different device: instead of modeling the outcome and confounder processes, they reweight each person by the inverse of their probability of receiving the treatment history they actually received. This creates a pseudo-population in which treatment is, by construction, unconfounded by the measured covariates, so a simple weighted regression recovers the causal effect. The companion 2000 paper applying the method to zidovudine and HIV survival showed its practical payoff. In social epidemiology, MSMs with IPTW are standard for the cumulative effects of time-varying social exposures.