Abstract
Background: Sequential positivity is often a necessary assumption for drawing causal inferences, such as through marginal structural modeling. Unfortunately, verification of this assumption can be challenging because it usually relies on multiple parametric propensity score models, unlikely to all be correctly specified. Therefore, we propose a new algorithm, called sequential Positivity Regression Tree (sPoRT), to overcome this issue and identify the subgroups found to be violating this assumption, allowing for insights about the nature of the violations and potential solutions. Methods: We present different versions of sPoRT based on either stratifying or pooling over time under static or dynamic treatment strategies. This methodologic development was motivated by a reallife application of the impact of the timing of initiation of HIV treatment with and without smoothing over time, which we also use to demonstrate the method. Results: The illustration of sPoRT demonstrates its easy use and the interpretability of the results for applied epidemiologists. Furthermore, an R notebook showing how to use sPoRT in practice is available in my github. Conclusions: The sPoRT algorithm provides interpretable subgroups violating the sequential positivity violation, allowing patterns
Arthur Chatton
Assistant Professor in Biostatistics
My research interests include causal inference, prediction and simulation studies.