Hi everyone!
This week at the Applied Statistics Workshop we will be welcoming *Laura
Balzer*, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the
Harvard University School of Public Health. She will be presenting work
entitled *Targeted Learning in the SEARCH trial and HIV prevention in East
Africa.* Please find the abstract below and on the website
<http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009/presentations/3232016-panagiotis-panos-toulis-time-coming-soon>
.
As usual, we will meet in CGIS Knafel Room 354 from noon to 1:30pm, and
lunch will be provided. See you all there! To view previous Applied
Statistics presentations, please visit the website
<http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009/videos>.
-- Aaron Kaufman
Title: Targeted Learning in the SEARCH trial and HIV prevention in East
Africa
Abstract: Evaluation of community-based interventions presents significant
methodological challenges. In this talk, we describe the design and
analysis of the SEARCH trial, an ongoing community randomized trial to
evaluate the impact of early HIV diagnosis and immediate treatment with
streamlined care in rural East Africa. We focus on 3 choices to optimize
study power: adaptive pair-matching over complete randomization, targeting
the sample average treatment effect instead of a population average
parameter, and data-adaptive adjustment through a pre-specified targeted
maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE). These choices are compared
theoretically and with finite sample simulations. We demonstrate each
choice improves efficiency relative to standard practice, while maintaining
nominal confidence interval coverage.
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