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Instrumental variables (IV) are a useful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. IV methods are well developed for uncensored outcomes, particularly for structural linear equation models, where simple…

Cardiovascular diseases are major causes of mortality globally. They often co-occur and are interrelated, leading to partial-order relationships among their onset times. However, these onset times are subject to informative censoring due to…

Sepsis is the leading cause of death in non-coronary intensive care units. Moreover, a delay of antibiotic treatment of patients with severe sepsis by only few hours is associated with increased mortality. This insight makes accurate models…

Anomia (word-finding difficulties) is the hallmark of aphasia, an acquired language disorder most commonly caused by stroke. Assessment of speech performance using picture naming tasks is a key method for both diagnosis and monitoring of…

In usual demographic analysis, force of mortality is a function of one variable, that is, of age. In this article bi-variate and multivariate force of mortality functions are introduced for the first time to explain mortality differentials.…

Causal understanding is a fundamental goal of evidence-based medicine. When randomization is impossible, causal inference methods allow the estimation of treatment effects from retrospective analysis of observational data. However, such…

Derived variables are variables that are constructed from one or more source variables through established mathematical operations or algorithms. For example, body mass index (BMI) is a derived variable constructed from two source…

In the causal adjustment setting, variable selection techniques based on either the outcome or treatment allocation model can result in the omission of confounders or the inclusion of spurious variables in the propensity score. We propose a…

Most causal inference studies rely on the assumption of overlap to estimate population or sample average causal effects. When data exhibit non-overlap, estimation of these estimands requires reliance on model specifications, due to poor…

Traditional disease surveillance can be augmented with a wide variety of real-time sources such as, news and social media. However, these sources are in general unstructured and, construction of surveillance tools such as taxonomical…

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

We investigate the bounding problem of causal effects in experimental studies in which the outcome is truncated by death, meaning that the subject dies before the outcome can be measured. Causal effects cannot be point identified without…

This paper discusses the different contemporaneous causal interpretations of Panel Vector Autoregressions (PVAR). I show that the interpretation of PVARs depends on the distribution of the causing variable, and can range from average…

In clinical trials, the observation of participant outcomes may frequently be hindered by death, leading to ambiguity in defining a scientifically meaningful final outcome for those who die. Principal stratification methods are valuable…

The population-attributable fraction (PAF) is a popular epidemiological measure for the burden of a harmful exposure within a population. It is often interpreted causally as proportion of preventable cases after an elimination of exposure.…

Instrumental variable methods provide a powerful approach to estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. But a key challenge when applying them is the reliance on untestable "exclusion" assumptions that rule out any…

Probabilistic machine learning models are often insufficient to help with decisions on interventions because those models find correlations - not causal relationships. If observational data is only available and experimentation are…

Disease mapping analyses the distribution of several disease outcomes within a territory. Primary goals include identifying areas with unexpected changes in mortality rates, studying the relation among multiple diseases, and dividing the…

Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…