Casual Inference

Alyssa Bilinski, Peterson Family Assistant Professor of Health Policy, and Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, at Brown University School of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing novel methods for policy evaluation and applying these to identify interventions that most efficiently improve population health and well-being. Episode notes: PNAS paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2302528120 Shuo Feng’s pre-print: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.08.24305335v1 Our uncertainty paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33475686/ Follow along on Twitter: Alyssa: @ambilinski The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Edward Kennedy Associate Professor, Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon. ehkennedy.com Evaluating a Targeted Minimum Loss-Based Estimator for Capture-Recapture Analysis: An Application to HIV Surveillance in San Francisco, California: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/193/4/673/7425624 Doubly Robust Capture-Recapture Methods for Estimating Population Size: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2023.2187814 Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Sheree Bekker & Stephen Mumford are Co-directors of the Feminist Sport Lab and have a book coming soon: “Open Play: the case for feminist sport”, coming Spring 2025. Reaktion Books (UK), University of Chicago Press (US). Sheree Bekker: Associate Professor, University of Bath, Department for Health, Centre for Qualitative Research Centre for Health and Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport Stephen Mumford, Professor of Metaphysics, Durham University  A Author of Dispositions (Oxford, 1998), Russell on Metaphysics (Routledge, 2003), Laws in Nature (Routledge, 2004), David Armstrong (Acumen, 2007), Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011), Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford, 2011 with Rani Lill Anjum), Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012) and Causation: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013 with Rani Lill Anjum). I was editor of George Molnar's posthumous Powers: a Study in Metaphysics (Oxford, 2003) and Metaphysics and Science (Oxford, 2013 with Matthew Tugby). Feminist Sport Lab: https://www.feministsportlab.com Causation: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum: https://academic.oup.com/book/616 Faye Norby, Iditarod champion & epidemiologist: https://www.kfyrtv.com/2024/03/28/faye-norby-finishes-iditarod-trail-womens-foot-champion/?outputType=amp  Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Erick Scott is founder of cStructure, a causal science startup. Erick has expertise in medicine, public health, and computational biology. info@cStructure.io “A causal roadmap for generating high-quality real-world evidence” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10603361/ Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Nima Hejazi is an assistant professor in biostatistics at Harvard University. His methodological work often draws upon tools and ideas from semi- and non-parametric inference, high-dimensional and large-scale inference, targeted or debiased machine learning (e.g., targeted minimum loss estimation, method of sieves), and computational statistics. Surprised by the Hot Hand Fallacy? A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers by Joshua B. Miller & Adam Sanjurjo: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44955325 Nima is on Twitter/X as @nshejazi (https://twitter.com/nshejazi) and my academic webpage is https://nimahejazi.org Recent translational review paper (intended for the infectious disease science community) I was involved in describing some causal/statistical frameworks for evaluating immune markers as mediators / surrogate endpoints: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38458870/ The tlverse software ecosystem is on GitHub at https://github.com/tlverse and the tlverse handbook is freely available at https://tlverse.org/tlverse-handbook/ Dr. Hejazi annually co-teaches a causal mediation analysis workshop at SER, and notes from the latest offering are freely available at https://codex.nimahejazi.org/ser2023_mediation_workshop/ Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Aaditya Ramdas is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Departments of Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include game-theoretic statistics and sequential anytime-valid inference, multiple testing and post-selection inference, and uncertainty quantification for machine learning (conformal prediction, calibration). His applied areas of interest include neuroscience, genetics and auditing (real-estate, finance, elections). Aaditya received the IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize, the COPSS Emerging Leader Award, the Bernoulli New Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Sloan fellowship in Mathematics, and faculty research awards from Adobe and Google. He also spends 20% of his time at Amazon working on causality and sequential experimentation. Aaditya’s website: https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~aramdas/ Game theoretic statistics resources Aaditya’s course, Game-theoretic probability, statistics, and learning: https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~aramdas/gtpsl/index.html Papers of interest: Time-uniform central limit theory and asymptotic confidence sequences: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06476 Game-theoretic statistics and safe anytime-valid inference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01948 Discussion papers: Safe Testing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07801 Testing by Betting: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article/184/2/407/7056412 Estimating means of bounded random variables by betting: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssb/article/86/1/1/7043257  Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Ingrid is a doctoral student in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.  Winning cookie recipe Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Nick Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Albers School of Business and Economics, Seattle University. His research focus is econometrics, causal inference, and higher education policy. He’s also the author of an introductory causal inference textbook called The Effect and the creator of a number of Stata packages for implementing causal effect estimation procedures. Nick’s book, online version: https://theeffectbook.net/ The Paper of How: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/W2FMEESMMSJMWDEZYY8Y?target=10.1111/obes.12598 Nick’s twitter & BlueSky: @nickchk Nick’s website: https://nickchk.com Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp    

Lucy and Ellie chat about immortal time bias, discussing a new paper Ellie co-authored on clone-censor-weights.  The Clone-Censor-Weight Method in Pharmacoepidemiologic Research: Foundations and Methodological Implementation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40471-024-00346-2  Immortal time in pregnancy: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36805380/  Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Mark van der Laan is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on developing statistical methods to estimate causal and non-causal parameters of interest, based on potentially complex and high dimensional data from randomized clinical trials or observational longitudinal studies, or from cross-sectional studies.  Center for Targeted Learning, Berkeley: https://ctml.berkeley.edu/ A causal roadmap: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37900353/  Short course on causal learning: https://ctml.berkeley.edu/introduction-causal-inference  Handbook on the TLverse (Targeted Learning in R): https://ctml.berkeley.edu/publications/targeted-learning-handbook-causal-machine-learning-and-inference-tlverse-r-software  Mark on twitter: @mark_vdlaan Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

Ellie and Lucy kick off the season and introduce our new executive buzzer, Melita! Melita is a masters student in statistics at Wake Forest University and will be helping out with the podcast (and keeping Lucy and Ellie from using too much jargon!) Pros & Cons of RCT paper:  Fernainy, P., Cohen, A.A., Murray, E. et al. Rethinking the pros and cons of randomized controlled trials and observational studies in the era of big data and advanced methods: a panel discussion. BMC Proc 18 (Suppl 2), 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12919-023-00285-8 Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDadeEdited by Cameron Bopp

We are re-releasing an episode from 2021 in remembrance of Ralph D'Agostino, Sr.  Ellie Murray and Lucy D’Agostino McGowan chat with Ralph D’Agostino Sr. and Ralph D’Agostino Jr. about their careers in statistics, looking back at how things have developed and forward at where they see the world of statistics and epidemiology going.  Ralph D’Agostino Sr. was a professor of Mathematics/Statistics, Biostatistics, and Epidemiology at Boston University. He was the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study, a biostatistical consultant to The New England Journal of Medicine, an editor of Statistics in Medicine and lead editor of their Tutorials, and a member and consultant on FDA committees. His major fields of research were clinical trials, prognostic models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research.  Ralph D’Agostino Jr. is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest University where he is the Director of the Biostatistics Core of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Methodologically his research includes developing statistical techniques for evaluating data from observational settings, handling missing data in applied problems, and developing predictive functions to identify prospectively patients at elevated risk for future negative outcomes. Some of his recent work includes the development of methods using propensity score models to identify safety signals in large retrospective databases. 

Ellie and Lucy chat with Dr. Cat Hicks, VP of Research Insights and Director of Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight Flow, about evidence science.    Follow along on Twitter: Cat: @grimalkina The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about a "Causal Quartet" and spend some extra time on M-Bias!   Lucy, Travis, & Malcom's Causal Quartet Paper Lucy's quartets R package Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about ENAR 2023 and Targeted Learning! Targeted Learning in R Handbook Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with #EpiCookieChallenge winner, Viktoria Gastens! Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Viktoria: @VikiGastens Viktoria's Lab: @PopHealthLabCH Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about confounding! ✍️ Lucy's new paper: Sensitivity Analyses for Unmeasured Confounders Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about randomized controlled trials, thinking about efficacy vs effectiveness and saftey vs safetiness. ✍️ Frank Harrell's blog post "Randomized Clinical Trials Do Not Mimic Clinical Practice, Thank Goodness" Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Maria Glymour, Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatstics at UCSF and incoming chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University. Maria successfully convinces Ellie and Lucy that instrumental variables can be very useful in epidemiology.  Follow up: ✍️ Andrew Heiss's blog post on marginal and conditional effects for GLMMs Follow along on Twitter: Maria Glymour: @MariaGlymour The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about critiquing methods research, average treatment effects, and positivity violations! Follow along on Twitter: The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi Ellie: @EpiEllie Lucy: @LucyStats 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade