Primary Submission Category: Generalizability/Transportability
An Estimator-Robust Design for Augmenting Randomized Controlled Trial with External Real-World Data
Authors: Sky Qiu, Jens Tarp, Andrew Mertens, Mark van der Laan,
Presenting Author: Sky Qiu*
Augmenting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with external real-world data (RWD) has the potential to improve the finite sample efficiency of treatment effect estimators. We describe using adaptive targeted maximum likelihood estimation (A-TMLE) for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) in the data augmentation context. This approach views the RCT data as the reference and corrects for inconsistencies of any kind between the RCT and the external data source. Given the growing abundance of external RWD from modern electronic health records, determining the optimal strategy to select candidate external patients for data integration remains an open yet critical problem. In this work, we begin by analyzing the robustness property of the A-TMLE estimator and then propose a matching-based sampling strategy that improves the robustness of the estimator with respect to the target estimand. Our proposed strategy is outcome-blind and involves matching based on two one-dimensional scores: the trial enrollment score and the propensity score in the external data. We demonstrate in simulations that our sampling strategy improves the coverage and shortens the widths of confidence intervals produced by A-TMLE. We illustrate our method with a case study of augmenting both insulin-analog treatment arms of the DEVOTE comparative cardiovascular safety trial by using the Optum Clinformatics claims database.