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http://dx.doi.org/10.5351/KJAS.2014.27.7.1077

Estimating Average Causal Effect in Latent Class Analysis  

Park, Gayoung (Department of Statistics, Korea University)
Chung, Hwan (Department of Statistics, Korea University)
Publication Information
The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics / v.27, no.7, 2014 , pp. 1077-1095 More about this Journal
Abstract
Unlike randomized trial, statistical strategies for inferring the unbiased causal relationship are required in the observational studies. Recently, new methods for the causal inference in the observational studies have been proposed such as the matching with the propensity score or the inverse probability treatment weighting. They have focused on how to control the confounders and how to evaluate the effect of the treatment on the result variable. However, these conventional methods are valid only when the treatment variable is categorical and both of the treatment and the result variables are directly observable. Research on the causal inference can be challenging in part because it may not be possible to directly observe the treatment and/or the result variable. To address this difficulty, we propose a method for estimating the average causal effect when both of the treatment and the result variables are latent. The latent class analysis has been applied to calculate the propensity score for the latent treatment variable in order to estimate the causal effect on the latent result variable. In this work, we investigate the causal effect of adolescents delinquency on their substance use using data from the 'National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health'.
Keywords
Average causal effect; causal inference; latent class analysis; propensity score;
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