Optimal estimation of coarse structural nested mean models with application to initiating ART in HIV infected patients

Understand

Coarse structural nested mean models are used to estimate treatment effects from longitudinal observational data.

• Coarse structural nested mean models lead to a large class of estimators.
• It turns out that estimates and standard errors may differ considerably within this class.
• We prove that, under additional assumptions, there exists an explicit solution for the optimal estimator within the class of coarse structural nested mean models.