arXiv subjects

Ioanna Tzoulaki

Publications and source records attributed to Ioanna Tzoulaki.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Efficient estimation of weighted cumulative treatment effects by double/debiased machine learning

In empirical studies with time-to-event outcomes, investigators often leverage observational data to conduct causal inference on the effect of exposure when randomized controlled trial data is unavailable. Model misspecification and lack of overlap are common issues in observational studies, and they often lead to inconsistent and inefficient estimators of the average treatment effect. Estimators targeting overlap weighted effects have been proposed to address the challenge of poor overlap, and methods enabling flexible machine learning for nuisance models address model misspecification. However, the approaches that allow machine learning for nuisance models have not been extended to the setting of weighted average treatment effects for time-to-event outcomes when there is poor overlap. In this work, we propose a class of one-step cross-fitted double/debiased machine learning estimators for the weighted cumulative causal effect as a function of restriction time. We prove that the proposed estimators are consistent, asymptotically linear, and reach semiparametric efficiency bounds under regularity conditions. Our simulations show that the proposed estimators using nonparametric machine learning nuisance models perform as well as established methods that require correctly-specified parametric nuisance models, illustrating that our estimators mitigate the need for oracle parametric nuisance models. We apply the proposed methods to real-world observational data from a UK primary care database to compare the effects of anti-diabetic drugs on cancer clinical outcomes.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

Tensor Dropout for Robust Learning

CNNs achieve remarkable performance by leveraging deep, over-parametrized architectures, trained on large datasets. However, they have limited generalization ability to data outside the training domain, and a lack of robustness to noise and adversarial attacks. By building better inductive biases, we can improve robustness and also obtain smaller networks that are more memory and computationally efficient. While standard CNNs use matrix computations, we study tensor layers that involve higher-order computations and provide better inductive bias. Specifically, we impose low-rank tensor structures on the weights of tensor regression layers to obtain compact networks, and propose tensor dropout, a randomization in the tensor rank for robustness. We show that our approach outperforms other methods for large-scale image classification on ImageNet and CIFAR-100. We establish a new state-of-the-art accuracy for phenotypic trait prediction on the largest dataset of brain MRI, the UK Biobank brain MRI dataset, where multi-linear structure is paramount. In all cases, we demonstrate superior performance and significantly improved robustness, both to noisy inputs and to adversarial attacks. We rigorously validate the theoretical validity of our approach by establishing the link between our randomized decomposition and non-linear dropout.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2009

Variant assumptions made in deriving equilibrium solutions to Little et al (PLoS Comput Biol 2009 5(10) e1000539)

The paper of Little et al. (PloS Comput Biol 2009 5(10) e1000539) outlined a system of reaction-diffusion equations that were used to describe induction of atherosclerotic disease. These were solved by considering an equilibrium solution and small perturbations around this equilibrium. Here we consider slight variant sets of assumptions that could be used to derive equilibrium solutions. In general they do not imply any change in the numerical results relating to monocyte chemo-attractant protein-1 (MCP-1) presented in that paper.

q-bio.TO↗