השוואת שיטות

	Marginal Structural Model (IPTW)	E-Value Sensitivity Analysis
תחום	Social Epidemiology	Social Epidemiology
משפחה	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
שנת המקור	2000	2017
הוגה השיטה	James M. Robins, Miguel A. Hernán & Babette Brumback	Tyler J. VanderWeele & Peng Ding
סוג	Reweighting pipeline for time-varying confounding affected by prior treatment	Assumption-free sensitivity analysis for unmeasured confounding
מקור מכונן	Robins, J. M., Hernán, M. A., & Brumback, B. (2000). Marginal structural models and causal inference in epidemiology. Epidemiology, 11(5), 550-560.	VanderWeele, T. J., & Ding, P. (2017). Sensitivity analysis in observational research: introducing the E-value. Annals of Internal Medicine, 167(4), 268-274.
כינויים	MSM with IPTW, Inverse-Probability-of-Treatment-Weighted Marginal Structural Model, IPTW Marginal Structural Model, Robins Marginal Structural Model	E-Value, E-Value for Unmeasured Confounding, VanderWeele-Ding E-Value, Bias Factor Sensitivity Analysis
קשורות	3	3
תקציר	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.	The E-value, introduced by Tyler VanderWeele and Peng Ding in 2017, is a simple, assumption-free way to quantify how robust an observational association is to unmeasured confounding. It answers a single, sharply posed question: how strong would an unmeasured confounder have to be — in its association with both the exposure and the outcome — to fully explain away the observed effect? The larger the E-value, the more powerful a hidden confounder would need to be, and so the more robust the finding. The method rests on the bounding factor derived by Ding and VanderWeele in their 2016 'Sensitivity analysis without assumptions,' which holds regardless of the distribution or number of unmeasured confounders. Because it requires only the point estimate and confidence limit on the risk-ratio scale and no untestable bias parameters, the E-value has become a routine reporting standard in observational epidemiology, including social epidemiology where unmeasured confounding is pervasive.