rcbsubset-package {rcbsubset}

Optimal Subset Matching with Refined Covariate Balance

Description

Tools for optimal subset matching of treated units and control units in observational studies, with support for refined covariate balance constraints, (including fine and near-fine balance as special cases). A close relative is the 'rcbalance' package. See Pimentel, et al.(2015) <doi:10.1080/01621459.2014.997879> and Pimentel and Kelz (2020) <doi:10.1080/01621459.2020.1720693>. The rrelaxiv package, which provides an alternative solver for the underlying network flow problems, carries an academic license and is not available on CRAN, but may be downloaded from Github at <https://github.com/josherrickson/rrelaxiv/>.

Details

The DESCRIPTION file:

Package:	rcbsubset
Type:	Package
Title:	Optimal Subset Matching with Refined Covariate Balance
Version:	1.1.7
Date:	2022-3-23
Author:	Samuel D. Pimentel
Maintainer:	Samuel D. Pimentel <[e-mail]>
Description:	Tools for optimal subset matching of treated units and control units in observational studies, with support for refined covariate balance constraints, (including fine and near-fine balance as special cases). A close relative is the 'rcbalance' package. See Pimentel, et al.(2015) <doi:10.1080/01621459.2014.997879> and Pimentel and Kelz (2020) <doi:10.1080/01621459.2020.1720693>. The rrelaxiv package, which provides an alternative solver for the underlying network flow problems, carries an academic license and is not available on CRAN, but may be downloaded from Github at <https://github.com/josherrickson/rrelaxiv/>.
Depends:	R (>= 3.2.0), MASS, plyr
Imports:	rcbalance, rlemon
License:	MIT + file LICENSE
Suggests:	testthat, rrelaxiv, optmatch
Additional_repositories:	https://errickson.net/rrelaxiv/

Index of help topics:

dist2net                Building and Manipulating Network Flow Problems
rcbsubset               Optimal Matching with Refined Covariate Balance
rcbsubset-package       Optimal Subset Matching with Refined Covariate
                        Balance

This package computes matches that are optimal under a set of refined covariate balance constraints. These constraints, provided by the user, are a set of nested categorical variables of decreasing imporance which must be marginally balanced as closely as possible in the resulting treated and matched control populations. In addition, treated units may be excluded in an optimal manner (using a penalty parameter) to improve the quality of the match. For more detail see the references.

The main function is rcbsubset, which takes a distance/sparsity matrix or matrix-like object containing information about matchability of the treated and control units and a list of fine balance variables and produces a match. The other functions are largely for internal use and should not be needed by the large majority of users. The syntax and code structure is very similar in the closely related antecedent package rcbalance, which provides more helper functions for constructing matches but does not support optimal subset matching.

By default the package uses the R package rlemon to solve the minimum-cost network flow optimization problems by which matches are computed. Alternatively, users may specify that the rrelaxiv package should be used instead. However, this package carries an academic license and is not available on CRAN so users must install it themselves.

Author(s)

Samuel D. Pimentel

Maintainer: Samuel D. Pimentel <[e-mail]>

References

Pimentel, S.D., Kelz, R.R., Silber, J.H., and Rosenbaum, P.R. (2015) Large, sparse optimal matching with refined covariate balance in an observational study of the health outcomes produced by new surgeons, JASA 110 (510), 515-527.

Pimentel, S.D., and Kelz, R.R. (2020). Optimal tradeoffs in matched designs comparing US-trained and internationally trained surgeons. JASA 115 (532), 1675-1688.

Rosenbaum, P.R. (2012) Optimal matching of an optimally chosen subset in observational studies, JCGS 21.1: 57-71.