Pre-analysis Plan for a Comparison of Matching and Black Box-based Covariate Adjustment

This article presents a pre-analysis plan for a comparison of methods for the statistical adjustment of observed confounders. In the planned analysis, we intend to replicate five existing studies that used customized form of matching and substantive input from subject matter experts. We will replicate the treatment effect estimates from these studies using machine learning methods that need little user input. In this article, we outline the five studies we will use for replication and discuss the methods we use for replication.