Matching methods for truncation by death problems

Abstract

Abstract Even in a carefully designed randomised trial, outcomes for some study participants can be missing, or more precisely, ill defined, because participants had died prior to outcome collection. This problem, known as truncation by death, means that the treated and untreated are no longer balanced with respect to covariates determining survival. Therefore, researchers often utilise principal stratification and focus on the Survivor Average Causal Effect (SACE). We present matching-based methods for SACE identification and estimation. We provide identification results motivating the use of matching and discuss practical issues, including the choice of distance measures, matching with replacement, and post-matching estimators. Because the assumptions needed for SACE identification can be too strong, we also present sensitivity analysis techniques and illustrate their use in real data analysis.