The Optimal Dynamic Treatment Rule SuperLearner: Considerations, Performance, and Application

Understand

The optimal dynamic treatment rule (ODTR) framework offers an approach for understanding which kinds of patients respond best to specific treatments -- in other words, treatment effect heterogeneity.

• Recently, there has been a proliferation of methods for estimating the ODTR.
• One such method is an extension of the SuperLearner algorithm -- an ensemble method to optimally combine candidate algorithms extensively used in prediction problems -- to ODTRs.
• Following the "causal roadmap," we causally and statistically define the ODTR and provide an introduction to estimating it using the ODTR SuperLearner.