Proximal Individualized Functional Treatment Regimes

Abstract

Estimating individualized treatment regimes (ITRs) is fundamental in data-driven personalized decision-making problems, such as precision medicine. Most of the ITR literature either focuses on categorical/continuous treatments or assumes no unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we make the first attempt to estimate the optimal individualized functional treatment regime (IFTR) for observational data where the treatment is a function and unmeasured confounding is present. We establish an identification result for a class of IFTRs under the proximal causal inference framework. Based on the identification result, we develop an algorithm of finding the optimal IFTR. The appealing practical performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by a simulation study. The proposed method is applied to an accelerometry dataset collected by the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to find the optimal physical activity distribution for the best of the Triglyceride-Glucose index.