Estimating causal excursion effects in mobile health with zero-inflated count outcomes

2348 

Contributed Abstract 

Paper 

Xueqing Liu (1), Tianchen Qian (2), Lauren Bell (3), Bibhas Chakraborty (1)

(1) Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore, N/A, (2) University of California, Irvine, N/A, (3) Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, N/A

Tianchen Qian  
University of California, Irvine

Lauren Bell  
Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge

Bibhas Chakraborty  
Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore

Xueqing Liu  
Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore

Xueqing Liu  
N/A

In mobile health, tailoring interventions for real-time delivery is of paramount importance. Micro-randomized trials have emerged as the ``gold-standard'' methodology for developing such interventions. Analyzing data from these trials provides insights into the efficacy of interventions and the potential moderation by specific covariates. The ``causal excursion effect", a novel class of causal estimand, addresses these inquiries. Yet, existing research mainly focuses on continuous or binary data, leaving count data largely unexplored. The current work is motivated by the Drink Less micro-randomized trial from the UK, which focuses on a zero-inflated proximal outcome, i.e., the number of screen views in the subsequent hour following the intervention decision point. To be specific, we revisit the concept of causal excursion effect, specifically for zero-inflated count outcomes, and introduce novel estimation approaches that incorporate nonparametric techniques. Bidirectional asymptotics are established for the proposed estimators. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. We also implement these methods to the Drink Less trial data.

Count outcome|Causal excursion effect|Micro-randomized trial|Mobile health|Structural nested mean model|

IMS

Statistical Methodology