Session 4 - Causal Inference Reading Group

For Session 4 of the Causal Inference Reading Group, Dr Weichang Yu will lead a discussion on dynamic treatment regimes.

In the management of patients with an ongoing disease, clinicians often make decisions at different timepoints during the treatment course such as initiating drug therapy, adjusting drug dosage, stopping ongoing therapy, etc. These decisions are typically made based on patients’ responses to existing treatments, their disease progression, and their clinical characteristics. For example, consider the treatment of a patient for depression. Despite being on Citalopram for 3 months, the patient did not show signs of improvement. Should the clinician augment the existing treatment with Bupropione? Or should the clinician recommend cognitive psychotherapy for the patient? And if the patient did not respond well following subsequent 3 months of Citalopram + Bupropione, should all drug therapies cease and should the clinician recommend cognitive psychotherapy?

Dynamic treatment regime formalises this decision process as an alternating sequence of treatment assignment, intermediate outcome, treatment assignment. The endpoint of dynamic treatment regime is to to optimise the expected final outcome among a pre-intervened population. The aim of this session is to provide participants with an overview of the dynamic treatment regime framework, the various approaches to estimating the optimal dynamic treatment regime (optimal sequence of decision rules), the advantages and pitfalls of these approaches, and the current research topics related to dynamic treatment regimes.

Suggested pre-reading is:

1. Chapter 1 of Dynamic Treatment Regimes - Statistical Methods for Precision Medicine

2. Q- and A- Learning Methods for Estimating Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes

3. The Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomised Trial for Controlling Infectious Diseases: A Review of Recent Developments

This session will be held in a hybrid setting. We encourage you to attend in person.

In person: Level 5, Room 5206, Steve Howard Room, Melbourne Connect
Virtual: https://unimelb.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUvdeqhqDwoG9WOPQ12nABAvqKn4SgRTpcd