International Journal of Epidemiology 2000;29:722-729
© International Epidemiological Association 2000
An introduction to instrumental variables for epidemiologists
Department of Epidemiology, UCLA School of Public Health, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772, USA.
Instrumental-variable (IV) methods were invented over 70 years ago, but remain uncommon in epidemiology. Over the past decade or so, non-parametric versions of IV methods have appeared that connect IV methods to causal and measurement-error models important in epidemiological applications. This paper provides an introduction to those developments, illustrated by an application of IV methods to non-parametric adjustment for non-compliance in randomized trials.
Keywords Biometry, causal models, compliance, confounding, econometrics, epidemiological methods, instrumental variables, measurement error, misclassification, regression, regression calibration, statistics
Accepted 17 December 1999
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