Guidelines and Best Practices for the Use of Targeted Maximum Likelihood and Machine Learning When Estimating Causal Effects of Exposures on Time‐To‐Event Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE) is an increasingly popular framework for the estimation of causal effects. It requires modeling both the exposure and outcome but is doubly robust in the sense that it is valid if at least one of these models is correctly specified. In addition, TMLE allows for flexible modeling of both the exposure and outcome with machine learning methods. This provides better control for measured confounders since the model specification automatically adapts to the data, instead of needing to be specified by the analyst a priori. Despite these methodological advantages, TMLE remains less popular than alternatives in part because of its less accessible theory and implementation. While some tutorials have been proposed, none address the case of a time-to-event outcome. This tutorial provides a detailed step-by-step explanation of the implementation of TMLE for estimating the effect of a point binary or multilevel exposure on a time-to-event outcome, modeled as counterfactual survival curves and causal hazard ratios. The tutorial also provides guidelines on how best to use TMLE in practice, including aspects related to study design, choice of covariates, controlling biases and use of machine learning. R-code is provided to illustrate each step using simulated data ( https://github.com/detal9/SurvTMLE). To facilitate implementation, a general R function implementing TMLE with options to use machine learning is also provided. The method is illustrated in a real-data analysis concerning the effectiveness of statins for the prevention of a first cardiovascular disease among older adults in Québec, Canada, between 2013 and 2018.
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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 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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".