2024 Allan Donner Lecture: Dr. Fan Li
Date: Friday, April 5
Time: 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Location: PHFM 3015 (Western Centre for Public Health and Family Medicine) or Zoom (link may be requested at EpiBio@uwo.ca)
The unit of inference in cluster randomized trials
Fan Li
Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
Yale School of Public Health,
Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science
Short Biography:
Fan Li is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health, and Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science. He obtained his PhD in Biostatistics from Duke University in 2019 and joined the Yale faculty since 2019. His research aims to develop methods for designing and analyzing cluster randomized trials, causal inference methods for estimand-aligned analyses of randomized experiments and observational studies. Dr. Li’s methodology research has been funded by multiple awards from the United States National Institutes of Health and Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institute as a principal investigator and a co-investigator. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles. He is Co-Editor in Chief of the journal, Epidemiologic Methods, and Associate Editor of several journals including Statistics in Medicine, Clinical Trials, and Implementation Science.
Abstract:
In cluster randomized trials, intact clusters of individuals rather than individuals themselves are randomly assigned to treatment conditions, creating a two-level structure that complicates the design and analysis compared to individually randomized trials. While the need to address intracluster correlations has motivated a robust literature for designing and analyzing cluster randomized trials in the past two decades, fewer efforts have integrated these developments in the context of treatment effect estimands. On page 13 of Donner and Klar (2000), it has already been suggested that “the target of inference in such studies (CRTs) could be at either the individual level or community level”, but the philosophy around unit of inference seems to be lost in translation until recently. In this presentation, we emphasize the difference between the unit of inference and the unit of analysis, and use the potential outcomes notation to define estimands that represent the unit of inference, regardless of the unit of analysis. In addition, we explain how one can standardize the output from any familiar regression model to ensure estimand-aligned inference. A key take-away is that one does not need to forgo the conventional wisdom developed in the existing literature to obtain the right inferential target, as long as the unit of inference is specified a priori, and a robust standardization procedure is applied to process the regression model output.
Keywords:
Cluster randomized trials; Stepped wedge designs; Causal inference; Estimands; Observational studies; Semiparametric methods.
About Allan Donner, PhD FRSC:
Allan Donner, PhD, FRSC, is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Western University and a former Director of Biostatistics at Robarts Clinical Trials, Inc. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Manitoba and obtained his Doctorate degree in Statistics from Harvard University, followed by four years at the Channing Laboratory, Harvard Medical School. He served as Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Western from 1987 to 2003.
Allan Donner's methodological research includes extensive contributions to the design and analysis of clinical trials, including many publications in leading journals, frequent invited presentations, and service on numerous Data Safety and Monitoring Committees. His interest in cluster randomization trials has led to his participation in several perinatal epidemiology trials sponsored by the World Health Organization and trials of vaccination strategies designed to prevent typhoid and cholera in developing countries, as sponsored by the International Vaccine Institute. Allan Donner is co-author (with Neil Klar, PhD) of the book “Design and Analysis of Cluster Randomization Trials in Health Research” (Wiley, 2000), the first text in this field that focused exclusively on randomized trials conducted in the health sciences.
Over the course of his career, Allan Donner has been a member of several Health Canada Advisory Committees including the Committee on Pharmaceutical Sciences and Clinical Pharmacology. He is currently a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American College of Epidemiology and the Royal Society of Canada.
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