Related papers: Analyzing Cause-Specific Mortality Trends using Co…
Various features of the development of individual living species, including individual humans, are programmed. Is death also programmed, and if yes, how is it implemented and what can be the underlying mechanism providing the inevitability…
Determinants of COVID-19 clinical severity are commonly assessed by transverse or longitudinal studies of the fatality counts. However, the fatality counts depend both on disease clinical severity and transmissibility, as more infected also…
Modern population genetics studies typically involve genome-wide genotyping of individuals from a diverse network of ancestries. An important, unsolved problem is how to formulate and estimate probabilistic models of observed genotypes that…
COVID-19 disease has affected almost every country in the world. The large number of infected people and the different mortality rates between countries has given rise to many hypotheses about the key points that make the virus so lethal in…
We use data from 107 Italian provinces to characterize and compare mortality patterns in the first two COVID-19 epidemic waves, which occurred prior to the introduction of vaccines. We also associate these patterns with mobility, timing of…
We review models of compositional growth, which were introduced to explain the growth statistics of various quantities ranging from firm sizes to GDP. In these models, entities are decomposed into units that grow independently. Thus, the…
In several countries, including Italy, a prominent approach to population health surveillance involves conducting repeated cross-sectional surveys at short intervals of time. These surveys gather information on the health status of…
When estimating causal effects using observational data, it is desirable to replicate a randomized experiment as closely as possible by obtaining treated and control groups with similar covariate distributions. This goal can often be…
The increasing life expectancy enhances the importance of mortality forecasting. Most developing nations, including Tanzania, forecast mortality rates using static life tables. However, these tables exaggerate death probabilities by…
The paper presents a method by which the mean field dynamics of a population of dynamical systems with parameter diversity and global coupling can be described in terms of a few macroscopic degrees of freedom. The method applies to…
Many existing mortality models follow the framework of classical factor models, such as the Lee-Carter model and its variants. Latent common factors in factor models are defined as time-related mortality indices (such as $\kappa_t$ in the…
This work introduces a Bayesian smoothing approach for the joint graduation of mortality rates across multiple populations. In particular, dynamical linear models are used to induce smoothness across ages through structured dependence,…
Mortality forecasting methods in the Lee-Carter tradition extrapolate temporal components via time-series models, often producing forecasts that systematically underpredict life expectancy at long horizons. This bias is consequential for…
In this paper we propose a systematic approach to construct mathematical models describing populations of cancer-cells at different stages of disease development. The methodology we propose is based on stochastic Concurrent Constraint…
When modeling sub-national mortality rates, it is important to incorporate any possible correlation among sub-populations to improve forecast accuracy. Moreover, forecasts at the sub-national level should aggregate consistently across the…
Personalized healthcare decisions require reasoning about how physiological and behavioral variables influence an individual patient over time. Existing temporal causal discovery methods are poorly matched to this setting: cohort-level…
The advent of molecular biology has led to the identification of definitive causative factors for a number of diseases, most of which are monogenic. Causes for most common diseases across the population, however, seem elusive and cannot be…
Tumor shape is a key factor that affects tumor growth and metastasis. This paper proposes a topological feature computed by persistent homology to characterize tumor progression from digital pathology and radiology images and examines its…
The approach of causality based on physical laws and systems is revisited. The issue of "levels", the relevance to epidemiology and the definition of effects are particularly developed. Moreover it is argued that this approach that we call…
Dependent survival data arise in many contexts. One context is clustered survival data, where survival data are collected on clusters such as families or medical centers. Dependent survival data also arise when multiple survival times are…