The question whether the telecommunication sector has been really supporting poverty alleviation and increasing welfare at the household level, in terms of an additional income in Indonesia is still undisclosed. This paper aims at investigating whether the mobile phone access and the uses on productive features/content/services have brought many benefits to the households in terms of an additio...

Despite the growing popularity of propensity score (PS) methods in epidemiology, relatively little has been written in the epidemiologic literature about the problem of variable selection for PS models. The authors present the results of two simulation studies designed to help epidemiologists gain insight into the variable selection problem in a PS analysis. The simulation studies illustrate ho...

PROPENSITY SCORE MATCHING FOR SURGICAL OUTCOMES WITH OBSERVATIONAL DATA Robert M. Cannon, 3/26/2012 Because of limitations in randomized controlled trials, medical researchers are often forced to rely upon studies of observational data. Confounding is a major difficulty encountered in such studies that can create considerable bias in estimates of treatment effects. Propensity score analysis was...

When releasing microdata to the public, data disseminators typically alter the original data to protect the confidentiality of database subjects’ identities and sensitive attributes. However, such alteration negatively impacts the utility (quality) of the released data. In this paper, we present quantitative measures of data utility for masked microdata, with the aim of improving disseminators’...

The propensity score is defined as the probability of each individual study subject being assigned to a group of interest for comparison purposes. Propensity score adjustment is a method of ensuring an even distribution of confounders between groups, thereby increasing between group comparability. Propensity score analysis is therefore an increasingly applied statistical method in observational...

Propensity-score methods are increasingly being used to reduce the impact of treatment-selection bias in the estimation of treatment effects using observational data. Commonly used propensity-score methods include covariate adjustment using the propensity score, stratification on the propensity score, and propensity-score matching. Empirical and theoretical research has demonstrated that matchi...