Causal analysis of ordinal treatments and binary outcomes under truncation by death

Abstract: It is common that in multiarm randomized trials, the outcome of interest is "truncated by death," meaning that it is only observed or well defined conditioning on an intermediate outcome. In this case, in addition to pairwise contrasts, the joint inference for all treatment arms is also of interest. Under a monotonicity assumption we present methods for both pairwise and joint causal analyses of ordinal treatments and binary outcomes in presence of truncation by death. We illustrate via examples the appropriateness of our assumptions in different scientific contexts.