Semiparametric Causal Sufficient Dimension Reduction Of Multidimensional Treatments

Abstract

Cause-effect relationships are typically evaluated by comparing outcome responses to binary treatment values, representing two arms of a hypothetical randomized controlled trial. However, in certain applications, treatments of interest are continuous and multidimensional. For example, understanding the causal relationship between severity of radiation therapy, summarized by a multidimensional vector of radiation exposure values and post-treatment side effects is a problem of clinical interest in radiation oncology. An appropriate strategy for making interpretable causal conclusions is to reduce the dimension of treatment. If individual elements of a multidimensional treatment vector weakly affect the outcome, but the overall relationship between treatment and outcome is strong, careless approaches to dimension reduction may not preserve this relationship. Further, methods developed for regression problems do not directly transfer to causal inference due to confounding complications. In this paper, we use semiparametric inference theory for structural models to give a general approach to causal sufficient dimension reduction of a multidimensional treatment such that the cause-effect relationship between treatment and outcome is preserved. We illustrate the utility of our proposals through simulations and a real data application in radiation oncology.