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The role of known effects in observational studies. (English) Zbl 0715.62185

Which treatments are not randomly assigned, treated and control subjects may be quite different prior to treatment, so that straightforward comparisons of responses in treated and control groups may give a distorted impression of the effect of the treatment. While adjustments for observed pretreatment differences can help, there is often reason for concern that important differences were not measured and not controlled by statistical adjustments. This paper concerns methods for detecting and indicating the probable impact of such unobserved pretreatment differences. The methods discussed here use known effects of the treatment on certain supplementary responses included in the study to provide information about unobserved pretreatment differences.

MSC:

62P10 Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis
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