Towards Robust Matched Observational Studies with General Treatment Types: Consistency, Efficiency, and Adaptivity

Abstract

To ensure reliable causal conclusions from observational studies, researchers routinely conduct sensitivity analysis to assess robustness to unmeasured confounding. In matched observational studies (one of the most popular observational study designs), two foundational concepts, design sensitivity and Bahadur-Rosenbaum efficiency, are used to quantify the robustness of test statistics and study designs in sensitivity analyses. Unfortunately, these measures of robustness are unavailable for non-binary treatments (e.g., continuous treatments) and consequently, prevailing recommendations about robust tests may be misleading. In this work, we provide a unified framework to quantify the robustness of test statistics and study designs for any treatment type. We first present a negative result about a popular, ad-hoc approach based on dichotomizing the treatment variable. Next, we consider two complementary parameterizations of the sensitivity parameter that apply to arbitrary treatment types and establish a one-to-one correspondence between them. Using these equivalent parameterizations, we generalize design sensitivity and Bahadur-Rosenbaum efficiency and derive unified formulas for both quantities under general treatment types. We also propose a general data-adaptive approach that combines candidate test statistics to enhance robustness against unmeasured confounding. Our results yield new insights into the robustness of tests and study designs in matched observational studies with non-binary treatments.