Demystifying Double Robustness: A Comparison of Alternative Strategies for Estimating a Population Mean from Incomplete Data

When outcomes are missing for reasons beyond an investigator’s control, there are two different ways to adjust a parameter estimate for covariates that may be related both to the outcome and to missingness. One approach is to model the relationships between the covariates and the outcome and use those relationships to predict the missing values. Another is to model the probabilities of missingness given the covariates and incorporate them into a weighted or stratified estimate. Doubly robust (DR) procedures apply both types of model simultaneously and produce a consistent estimate of the parameter if either of the two models has been correctly specified. In this article, we show that DR estimates can be…