title: Confidence intervals for causal parameters.
abstract: Consider an unbiased follow-up study designed to investigate the causal effect of a dichotomous exposure on a dichotomous disease outcome. Under a deterministic outcome model, a standard '95 per cent binomial confidence interval' may fail to cover the causal parameter of interest at the nominal rate when we take the causal parameter to be a parameter associated with the observed study population (regardless of whether the observed study population was sampled from a larger superpopulation). I propose new interval estimators that, in this setting, improve upon the performance of the standard 'binomial confidence interval.'
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Robins
mesh_terms: D001699:Biometry; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D011897:Random Allocation; D012307:Risk Factors