. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Jun 1.

Published in final edited form as: Stat Methods Med Res. 2018 Jun 19;28(6):1761–1780. doi: 10.1177/0962280218774936

Table 1.

Targeted estimators considered for Simulation 1: “Causal Model” refers to the causal model assumed during development of the estimator.

Estimator	Causal Model	Outcome Regression	Pscore Regression	Targeting
TMLE-Ia	General (equation (I))	Cluster-level	Cluster-level	Cluster-level
TMLE-Ib^a	General (equation (I))	Individual-level^b	Cluster-level	Cluster-level
TMLE-II	Restrictive (equation (II))	Individual-level	Individual-level	Individual-level

Note: “Cluster-level” refers to logistic regression after all the data are aggregated. “Individual-level” refers to logistic regression pooling individuals across clusters and with weights α_ij = I/N_j.

During estimation consider working assumptions to generate alternative estimators of ${\overset{‒}{Q}}_{0}^{c}$ .

Run a pooled individual-level regression and then average individual-level predictions within clusters.