Bridging Binarization: Causal Inference with Dichotomized Continuous Exposures
连接二值化与连续暴露:二分连续暴露的因果推断
The average treatment effect (ATE) is a common parameter estimated in causal inference literature, but it is only defined for binary exposures. Thus, despite concerns raised by some researchers, many studies seeking to estimate the causal effect of a continuous exposure create a new binary exposure variable by dichotomizing the continuous values into two categories. In this paper, we affirm binarization as a statistically valid method for answering causal questions about…