This R package estimates the statistical parameter E(E(Y|A=1,B)-E(Y|A=0,B)|A=a) using targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE). If A is a treatment, then this is sort of like a Treatment Effect, Conditional on one of the treatments, hence the name tmlecte. Under various causal models, this statistical parameter has interpretations of things like

• the affect of treatment among the treated (ATT)
• the natural direct effect (NDE), and
• the natural direct effect among the untreated.

The methods in this package will probably be added to the tmle package on CRAN in the future.

#Installation

This package can be installed directly from github using the devtools package:

install.packages("devtools") #if you don't have it already
library(devtools)
install_github("lendle/tmlecte")

Alternatively you could download the source or clone it with git, then R CMD BUILD and R CMD INSTALL it.

#Usage

Once installed, the package is loaded with library(tmlecte). Documentation is available in R's built in documentation system (?tmlecte). Some examples are provided in the documentation.

#References

Lendle, S. D., Subbaraman, M. S., and van der Laan, M. J. (2013). Identification and efficient estimation of the natural direct effect among the untreated. Biometrics, 69(2), 310-317.

Van der Laan, M. J., and Rose, S. (2011). Targeted learning: causal inference for observational and experimental data. Springer.