Casual Inference – Details, episodes & analysis

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 McDade
Edited 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 McDade
Edited 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 McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp

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