In this short communication, we describe the recent debate on whether the hazard function should be used for causal inference in time-to-event studies and consider three different potential outcomes frameworks (by Rubin, Robins, and Pearl, respectively) as well as use the single-world intervention graph to show mathematically that the hazard function has causal interpretations under all three frameworks. In addition, we argue that the hazard ratio over time can provide a useful interpretation in practical settings.

翻译：在这篇短文中，我们描述了近期关于是否应在时间至事件研究中将风险函数用于因果推断的争论，并考察了三种不同的潜在结果框架（分别由Rubin、Robins和Pearl提出），同时利用单世界干预图从数学上证明，在这三种框架下，风险函数均具有因果解释。此外，我们认为，随时间变化的风险比在实际场景中能够提供有用的解释。