Assessing balance in outcome regressions

An outcome regression controlling for observed confounders remains a popular way to assess the causal effect of an exposure in epidemiology, despite more modern causal techniques for adjusting for observed confounders, such as inverse probability weighting. A feature of inverse probability weighting is that checking balance of confounders in the control and exposure groups after confounder adjustment is simple. However, researchers using outcome regressions commonly do not check confounder balance after controlling for confounders. Although outcome regressions will balance any confounder specified in the model, the confounder value the model balances at is not transparent. We show that a matrix representation of an outcome regression reveals that an outcome regression includes a weight similar to an inverse probability weight. We also show that outcome regressions may not be balancing at the sample mean of the confounders particularly if interactions are not included with the exposure, which is typically the case in outcome regressions. Finally, we show that the coefficient of the exposure in an outcome regression is simply the difference between two weighted counterfactuals. Thus, there is an important connection between traditional outcome regression and modern causal techniques.