
*For exact time and location, please refer to upcoming individual lecture poster
Director of CAUSALab
Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard
Decisions about the treatment and prevention of disease are guided by causal inference and health researchers often make causal inferences using healthcare databases. The emergence of tools referred to as “AI” may transform the way in which those databases are used for causal inference. However, for “AI” to speed up the causal learning for healthcare databases, we need a better understanding of what both “AI” and causal inference are. This talk dissects the components of “Causal AI” and
discusses its potential to automate causal research in the health sciences.
Associate professor
Chair of Biostatistics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Professor of Econometrics at the European University Institute’s Department of Economics
Professor of Applied Econometrics and Policy Evaluation – Department of Economics of Fribourg University
Academic assistant (lecturer) at Leipzig University
Full Professor of Medical Statistics, University of Florence
Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies Co-leader of the Causal Inference Interest Group
Compositional data is a form of hierarchical data in which a whole (or a total) is the sum of its constituent components. Although compositional data can arise in any setting, they are particularly common in health research, with typical examples including dietary, physical activity, or microbiome data. This type of data can bring a range of analytical and interpretational challenges which risks results being misinterpreted.
In this talk, I will introduce compositional data using directed acrylic graphs (DAGs), outline the different types of causal effects that may be of interest in such data, and discuss suitable analytical approaches.
Associate Professor of Health Data Science at the University of Leeds Former fellow of the UK’s Alan Turing Institute Incoming George Sadan Visiting Associate Professor at Yale University for 2026
Estimating causal effects in non-experimental data is a key aim of applied health and social science research. Unfortunately, it is also notoriously difficult.
Contemporary causal inference methods, including directed acyclic graphs, promise to revolutionise the analysis and interpretation
non-experimental data, not least by making our ambitions and assumptions far more explicit. In the health sciences, these methods are rapidly gaining popularity, but they are still yet to be adopted as widely as other entrenched
methods.
This talk offers a simple introduction to the new
science of causal inference, with a particular focus on directed acyclic graphs.
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