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Age dependent performance disparities in medical image classification often arise because age acts as a confounder, linking imaging morphology with disease prevalence. In practice, disparities can manifest as overdiagnosis at ages where…
Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…
We point out an instantiation of Simpson's paradox in Covid-19 case fatality rates (CFRs): comparing a large-scale study from China (17 Feb) with early reports from Italy (9 Mar), we find that CFRs are lower in Italy for every age group,…
Two important considerations in clinical research studies are proper evaluations of internal and external validity. While randomized clinical trials can overcome several threats to internal validity, they may be prone to poor external…
To complement traditional dietary surveys, which are costly and of limited scale, researchers have resorted to digital data to infer the impact of eating habits on people's health. However, online studies are limited in resolution: they are…
Simpson's paradox is an obstacle to establishing a probabilistic association between two events $a_1$ and $a_2$, given the third (lurking) random variable $B$. We focus on scenarios when the random variables $A$ (which combines $a_1$,…
To use social media for health-related analysis, one key step is the detection of health-related labels for users. But unlike transient conditions like flu, social media users are less vocal about chronic conditions such as obesity, as…
In the presence of competing events, many investigators are interested in a direct treatment effect on the event of interest that does not capture treatment effects on competing events. Classical survival analysis methods that treat…
We study the performance of general dynamic matching models. This model is defined by a connected graph, where nodes represent the class of items and the edges the compatibilities between items. Items of different classes arrive one by one…
Many of the traditional recommendation algorithms are designed based on the fundamental idea of mining or learning correlative patterns from data to estimate the user-item correlative preference. However, pure correlative learning may lead…
Weight gain is a well-established side effect of both conventional and newer anti-psychotic drugs, but the cause is not well understood. Recent studies correlate obesity with the presence or absence of particular genetic sequences in the…
Although living organisms are affected by many interrelated and unidentified variables, this complexity does not automatically impose a fundamental limitation on statistical inference. Nor need one invoke such complexity as an explanation…
In the field of road safety, it is common to use responsibility analyses to assess the effect of a given factor on the risk of being responsible for an accident, among drivers involved in an accident only. Even if this design is now widely…
Clinical decisions to treat and diagnose patients are affected by implicit biases formed by racism, ableism, sexism, and other stereotypes. These biases reflect broader systemic discrimination in healthcare and risk marginalizing already…
In this article, we use the illness-death model to present a mathematical framework for studying the compression of morbidity (COM) hypothesis. It turns out that questions about COM are completely determined by the transition rates in the…
Aging associated brain decline often result in some kind of dementia. Even when this is a complex brain disorder a physical model can be used in order to describe its general behavior. This model is based in first principles. A…
Obesity is one of the leading health concerns in the United States. Researchers and health care providers are interested in understanding factors affecting obesity and detecting the likelihood of obesity as early as possible. In this paper,…
To uncover the city's fundamental functioning mechanisms, it is important to acquire a deep understanding of complicated relationships among citizens, location, and mobility behaviors. Previous research studies have applied direct…
In this study, we delve into the intricate relationships between diabetes and a range of health indicators, with a particular focus on the newly added variable of income. Utilizing data from the 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance…
Background: Immortal time is a period of follow-up during which death or the study outcome cannot occur by design. Bias from immortal time has been increasingly recognized in epidemiologic studies. However, the fundamental causes and…