Performance study of propensity score methods against regression with covariate adjustment

In observational study, handling confounders is a primary issue in measuring treatment effect of interest. Historically, a regression with covariate adjustment (covariate-adjusted regression) has been the typical approach to estimate treatment effect incorporating potential confounders into model. However, ever since the introduction of the propensity score, covariate-adjusted regression has been gradually replaced in medical literatures with various balancing methods based on propensity score. On the other hand, there is only a paucity of researches assessing propensity score methods compared with the covariate-adjusted regression. This paper examined the performance of propensity score methods in estimating risk difference and compare their performance with the covariate-adjusted regression by a Monte Carlo study. The study demonstrated in general the covariate-adjusted regression with variable selection procedure outperformed propensity-score-based methods in terms both of bias and MSE, suggesting that the classical regression method needs to be considered, rather than the propensity score methods, if a performance is a primary concern.