Primary Submission Category: Weighting
Is there a survival benefit of initiating treatment earlier rather than later?
Authors: Haris Fawad,
Presenting Author: Haris Fawad*
This question arises in a variety of clinical settings, for example organ transplantations and palliative care for cancer patients. To provide an answer, we build a causal model based on counting processes and their intensities. The counting process framework is already well-suited for survival analysis. We only change the intensity of treatment to model hypothetical scenarios in which treatment occurs earlier, compared to the observational data. We highlight the structural assumptions needed for the identification of survival parameters, and present consistent estimators along with analytical expressions for their asymptotic confidence intervals.