Commentary on ‘Using inverse weighting and predictive inference to estimate the effects of time‐varying treatments on the discrete‐time hazard’

INTRODUCTION I would like to begin by thanking the editor Ralph D'Agostino for his recognition of the importance of the topic considered in Dawson and Lavori's paper and for inviting this commentary. Dawson and Lavori (DL) propose several methods for estimating the e#ect of a monotone treatment pattern on the hazard function of a discrete failure time variable and compare their approaches to others previously proposed. In my opinion, DL's methods in their Sections 1--3 are interesting and correct but are not the best available. However, I believe the methods DL propose in Sections 4 and 5 are biased without the addition of further, rather implausible, assumptions. Additionally, I feel that certain of DL comments indicate they are not fully aware of the motivation for and the range of the di#erent methods proposed by myself and colleagues. My commentary is organized as follows. I #rst review DL's methodological proposals in the order in which they appear in their paper and compare othe