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Marginal Structural Models: unbiased estimation for longitudinal studies
Erica E M Moodie1, D A Stephens
1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McGill University, 1020 Pine Avenue West, Montreal, QC, H3A 1A2, Canada. erica.moodie@mcgill.ca
Introduction:
In this article, we introduce Marginal Structural Models, which yield unbiased estimates of causal effects of exposures in the presence of time-varying confounding variables that also act as mediators.
Objectives:
We describe estimation via inverse probability weighting; estimation may also be accomplished by g-computation (Robins in Latent Variable Modeling and Applications to Causality, Springer, New York, pp 69-117, 1997; van der Wal et al. in Stat Med 28:2325-2337, 2009) or targeted maximum likelihood (Rosenblum and van der Laan in Int J Biostat 6, 2010).
Conclusions:
When both time-varying confounding and mediation are present in a longitudinal setting data, Marginal Structural Models are a useful tool that provides unbiased estimates.
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