{"doi":"10.1093/biomet/asaa105","title":"Discussion of ‘Estimating time-varying causal excursion effects in mobile health with binary outcomes’","abstract":"We congratulate Qian et al. (2021) on a thought-provoking paper, which highlights the challenges associated with constructing solutions that are statistically elegant and contribute to the advancement of intervention science. In sequential decision problems where the same intervention is being offered repeatedly, a natural question is whether or not the intervention is effective. For example, consider an ongoing school attendance intervention study, conducted by the Institute of Education Services, in which parents or guardians of children in grades K–2 are sent messages on their smart devices encouraging school attendance (Institute of Education Services, 2020). While investigators conducting this trial are interested in identifying when, in what contexts and for whom these messages are likely to be most effective, their initial, primary, question was whether using text messages is a promising strategy for increasing regular attendance. This point is underscored by a recent report on findings from the study, titled Can Texting Parents Improve Attendance in Elementary School?, issued by the American Institutes for Research (2020), which was contracted to run the study. As the title suggests, investigators want to know whether text-based messaging is worthwhile before investing in subsequent studies aimed at refining the content, timing and personalization of the messages.","journal":"Biometrika","year":2020,"id":125839,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9572,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":367007,"name":"Eric B. Laber","orcid":"0000-0003-2640-7696","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":284322,"name":"Y Zhang","orcid":"0000-0003-2315-9009","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":1,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:15:19.482428Z","pmid":"34400905","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}