Target Trial Emulation (TTE) is am approach in epidemiology and causal inference for designing and analyzing observational studies by explicitly emulating a hypothetical underlying randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the "target trial" — that would be able to answer the research question, developed by Miguel Hernán and Jamie Robins, TTE addresses a core problem: observational data can answer causal questions, but only if the analysis is carefully structured to mimic the logic of a trial. Without this discipline, subtle biases arise. Before analyzing observational data, researchers explicitly specify the protocol of the RCT they wish they could run, then map each component of that protocol onto the available data.
Murray A. Mittleman, MD, DrPH
Professor of Epidemiology
Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health