Causal Inference for Preprocessed Outcomes with an Application to Functional Connectivity
预处理结局的因果推断及其在功能连接中的应用
In biomedical research, repeated measurements within each subject are often processed to remove artifacts and unwanted sources of variation. The resulting data are used to construct derived outcomes that act as proxies for scientific outcomes that are not directly observable. Although intra-subject processing is widely used, its impact on inter-subject statistical inference has not been systematically studied, and a principled framework for causal analysis in this setting is…