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Lower-and-middle income countries are faced with challenges arising from a lack of data on cause of death (COD), which can limit decisions on population health and disease management. A verbal autopsy(VA) can provide information about a COD…
Metabolic syndrome is a complex clinical condition characterized by the simultaneous presence of multiple metabolic risk factors and represents a major public health concern. The syndrome develops silently and may remain undiagnosed for…
When teaching and discussing statistical assumptions, our focus is oftentimes placed on how to test and address potential violations rather than the effects of violating assumptions on the estimates produced by our statistical models. The…
Social influence is a strong determinant of food consumption, which in turn influences health. Although consistent observations have been made on the role of social factors in driving similarities in food consumption, much less is known…
Researchers frequently estimate treatment effects by regressing outcomes (Y) on treatment (D) and covariates (X). Even without unobserved confounding, the coefficient on D yields a conditional-variance-weighted average of strata-wise…
For exposures $X$ like obesity, no precise and unambiguous definition exists for the hypothetical intervention $do(X = x_0)$. This has raised concerns about the relevance of causal effects estimated from observational studies for such…
Obesity is a global epidemic causing at least 2.8 million deaths per year. This complex disease is associated with significant socioeconomic burden, reduced work productivity, unemployment, and other social determinants of Health (SDoH)…
The illness-death model of a chronic disease consists of the states 'Normal', 'Disease' and 'Death'. In general, the transition rates between the states depend on three time scales: calendar time, age and duration of the chronic disease.…
Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) is a serious condition that can be an early warning sign of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. MetS is characterized by having elevated levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, waist circumference, and fasting…
Difference-in-differences (DID) is popular because it can allow for unmeasured confounding when the key assumption of parallel trends holds. However, there exists little guidance on how to decide a priori whether this assumption is…
We propose novel estimators for categorical and continuous treatments by using an optimal covariate balancing strategy for inverse probability weighting. The resulting estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal for…
In the field of road safety epidemiology, 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. Using the SCM…
Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is an important cause of disability and death among individuals with Diabetes Mellitus (DM). International clinical guidelines for the management of Type 2 DM (T2DM) are founded on primary and secondary…
The prevalence of chronic non-communicable diseases such as obesity has noticeably increased in the last decade. The study of these diseases in early life is of paramount importance in determining their course in adult life and in…
In many situations people make sequences of similar, but unrelated decisions. Such decision sequences are prevalent in many important contexts including judicial judgments, loan approvals, college admissions, and athletic competitions. A…
In interventional health studies, causal mediation analysis can be employed to investigate mechanisms through which the intervention affects the targeted health outcome. Identifying direct and indirect (i.e. mediated) effects from empirical…
On roads showing significant violations of posted speed limits, one measure of the safety effect of speeding is the difference between the road's actual accident count and the count that would have occurred if the posted speed limit had…
I present a theory of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) that explains its symptoms, pathology, and risk factors. To do this, I introduce a new theory of brain plasticity that elucidates the physiological roles of AD-related agents. New events…
Comparing counterfactual distributions can provide more nuanced and valuable measures for causal effects, going beyond typical summary statistics such as averages. In this work, we consider characterizing causal effects via distributional…
Bell inequalities follow from a set of seemingly natural assumptions about how to provide a causal model of a Bell experiment. In the face of their violation, two types of causal models that modify some of these assumptions have been…