title: An overview of the objectives of and the approaches to propensity score analyses.
abstract: The assessment of treatment effects from observational studies may be biased with patients not randomly allocated to the experimental or control group. One way to overcome this conceptual shortcoming in the design of such studies is the use of propensity scores to adjust for differences of the characteristics between patients treated with experimental and control interventions. The propensity score is defined as the probability that a patient received the experimental intervention conditional on pre-treatment characteristics at baseline. Here, we review how propensity scores are estimated and how they can help in adjusting the treatment effect for baseline imbalances. We further discuss how to evaluate adequate overlap of baseline characteristics between patient groups, provide guidelines for variable selection and model building in modelling the propensity score, and review different methods of propensity score adjustments. We conclude that propensity analyses may help in evaluating the comparability of patients in observational studies, and may account for more potential confounding factors than conventional covariate adjustment approaches. However, bias due to unmeasured confounding cannot be corrected for.
authors.affiliation: Section for Clinical Biometrics, Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems, Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, A-1090 Vienna, Austria. georg.heinze@meduniwien.ac.at
authors.forename: Georg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Heinze
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Jüni
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D015982:Bias; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015986:Confounding Factors, Epidemiologic; D006801:Humans; D057216:Propensity Score; D016896:Treatment Outcome