Individual causal effects from observational longitudinal studies with time-varying exposures

Abstract

Causal effects may vary among individuals and can even be of opposite signs. When significant effect heterogeneity exists, the population average causal effect might be uninformative for an individual. Due to the fundamental problem of causality, individual causal effects (ICEs) cannot be retrieved from cross-sectional data. However, in crossover studies, it is accepted that ICEs can be estimated under the assumptions of no carryover effects and time invariance of potential outcomes. A generic potential-outcome formulation with appropriate statistical assumptions to identify ICEs is lacking for other longitudinal data with time-varying exposures. We present a general framework for causal effect heterogeneity in which individual-specific effect modification is parameterized with a latent variable, the receptiveness factor. If the exposure varies over time, then the repeated measurements contain information on an individual's level of this receptiveness factor. Therefore, we study the conditional distribution of the ICE given all an individual's factual information. This novel conditional random variable is called the cross-world causal effect (CWCE). For known causal structures and time-varying exposures, the variability of the CWCE reduces with an increasing number of repeated measurements. The CWCE becomes identifiable from observational data under the causal assumption of cross-world similarity of individual-effect modification (i.e. there exists an exposure strategy whose effect is affected by all latent causes). We illustrate the theory with examples in which the cause-effect relations can be parameterized as generalized linear mixed assignments.