Papers › Increasing efficiency and reducing bias when assessing HPV vaccination efficacy by...
Increasing efficiency and reducing bias when assessing HPV vaccination efficacy by using non-targeted HPV strains
Lola Etievant, Joshua N. Sampson, Mitchell H. Gail
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Studies of vaccine efficacy often record both the incidence of vaccine-targeted virus strains (primary outcome) and the incidence of non-targeted strains (secondary outcome). However, standard estimates of vaccine efficacy on targeted strains ignore the data on non-targeted strains. Assuming non-targeted strains are unaffected by vaccination, we regard the secondary outcome as a negative control outcome and show how using such data can (i) increase the precision of the estimated vaccine efficacy against targeted strains in randomized trials, and (ii) reduce confounding bias of that same estimate in observational studies. For objective (i), we augment the primary outcome estimating equation with a function of the secondary outcome that is unbiased for zero. For objective (ii), we jointly estimate the treatment effects on the primary and secondary outcomes. If the bias induced by the unmeasured confounders is similar for both types of outcomes, as is plausible for factors that influence the general risk of infection, then we can use the estimated efficacy against the secondary outcomes to remove the bias from estimated efficacy against the primary outcome. We demonstrate the utility of these approaches in studies of HPV vaccines that only target a few highly carcinogenic strains. In this example, using non-targeted strains increased precision in randomized trials modestly but reduced bias in observational studies substantially.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections