Discussion of “Dynamic treatment regimes: Technical challenges and applications”

Abstract

We thank the editor for organizing this discussion of the article by Laber et al. (2014) (throughout referred to as LLQPM). The authors offer an elegant solution to the inferential problem caused by nonregularity. Our discussion will to a large extent focus on conceptual rather than technical issues, in part because the authors handled the technical matters so decisively and well. In so doing, we recognize that discussion of conceptual issues was not the authors’ goal and that the authors have written elsewhere about many of the issues we raise. Indeed, in our own writing, we have often either ignored the issues we raise or were unable to offer coherent solutions to them. We hope our discussion makes for an interesting and lively interchange.