A simulation study of finite‐sample properties of marginal structural Cox proportional hazards models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Motivated by a previously published study of HIV treatment, we simulated data subject to time-varying confounding affected by prior treatment to examine some finite-sample properties of marginal structural Cox proportional hazards models. We compared (a) unadjusted, (b) regression-adjusted, (c) unstabilized, and (d) stabilized marginal structural (inverse probability-of-treatment [IPT] weighted) model estimators of effect in terms of bias, standard error, root mean squared error (MSE), and 95% confidence limit coverage over a range of research scenarios, including relatively small sample sizes and 10 study assessments. In the base-case scenario resembling the motivating example, where the true hazard ratio was 0.5, both IPT-weighted analyses were unbiased, whereas crude and adjusted analyses showed substantial bias towards and across the null. Stabilized IPT-weighted analyses remained unbiased across a range of scenarios, including relatively small sample size; however, the standard error was generally smaller in crude and adjusted models. In many cases, unstabilized weighted analysis showed a substantial increase in standard error compared with other approaches. Root MSE was smallest in the IPT-weighted analyses for the base-case scenario. In situations where time-varying confounding affected by prior treatment was absent, IPT-weighted analyses were less precise and therefore had greater root MSE compared with adjusted analyses. The 95% confidence limit coverage was close to nominal for all stabilized IPT-weighted but poor in crude, adjusted, and unstabilized IPT-weighted analysis. Under realistic scenarios, marginal structural Cox proportional hazards models performed according to expectations based on large-sample theory and provided accurate estimates of the hazard ratio.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".