Generalized Simple Graphical Rules for Assessing Selection Bias

Abstract: Selection bias is a major obstacle toward valid causal inference in epidemiology. Over the past decade, several simple graphical rules based on causal diagrams have been proposed as the sufficient identification conditions for addressing selection bias and recovering causal effects. However, these simple graphical rules are usually coupled with specific identification strategies and estimators. In this article, we show two important cases of selection bias that cannot be addressed by these simple rules and their estimators: one case where selection is a descendant of a collider of the treatment and the outcome, and the other case where selection is affected by the mediator. To address selection bias in these two cases, we construct identification formulas by the g-computation and the inverse probability weighting (IPW) methods based on single-world intervention graphs (SWIGs). They are generalized to recover the average treatment effect by adjusting for post-treatment upstream causes of selection. We propose two IPW estimators and their variance estimators to recover the average treatment effect in the presence of selection bias in these two cases. We conduct simulation studies to verify the performance of the estimators when the traditional crude selected-sample analysis returns erroneous contradictory conclusions to the truth.