Related papers: Mindel C. Sheps: Counted, dead or alive
In the 1958 paper "Shall we count the living or the dead?", Mindel C. Sheps proposed a principled solution to the familiar problem of asymmetry of the relative risk. We provide causal models to clarify the scope and limitations of Sheps'…
Standard measures of effect, including the risk ratio, the odds ratio, and the risk difference, are associated with a number of well-described shortcomings, and no consensus exists about the conditions under which investigators should…
Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…
There have been significant efforts devoted to solving the longevity risk given that a continuous growth in population ageing has become a severe issue for many developed countries over the past few decades. The Cairns-Blake-Dowd (CBD)…
The stochastic system approach to causality is applied to situations where the risk of death is not negligible. This approach grounds causality on physical laws, distinguishes system and observation and represents the system by multivariate…
Causal inference with time-to-event outcomes is fundamental in various scientific studies. In a static setup with fitted propensity scores, weighted Kaplan-Meier estimation for survival probabilities and weighted Breslow-Peto estimation for…
This article focuses on the work of O. Chanel and G. Chichilnisky (2013) on the flaws of expected utility theory while assessing the value of life. Expected utility is a fundamental tool in decision theory. However, it does not fit with the…
This paper is about how we study statistical methods. As an example, it uses the random regressions model, in which the intercept and slope of cluster-specific regression lines are modeled as a bivariate random effect. Maximizing this…
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work…
Survival outcomes are common in comparative effectiveness studies and require unique handling because they are usually incompletely observed due to right-censoring. A ``once for all'' approach for causal inference with survival outcomes…
Inferring causal effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to treatment. Observational studies in infectious disease research present the additional challenge that one participant's treatment…
Cohort studies employ pairwise measures of association to quantify dependencies among conditions and exposures. To reliably use these measures to draw conclusions about the underlying association strengths requires that the measures be…
Suppose, contrary to fact, in 1950, we had put the cohort of 18 year old non-smoking American men on a stringent mandatory diet that guaranteed that no one would ever weigh more than their baseline weight established at age 18. How would…
Recently, we have shown that the age-specific prevalence of a disease can be related to the transition rates in the illness-death model via a partial differential equation (PDE). In case of a chronic disease, we show that the PDE can be…
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 Health and Retirement Study is a longitudinal study of US adults enrolled at age 50 and older. We were interested in investigating the effect of a sudden large decline in wealth on the cognitive score of subjects. Our analysis was…
We use the exact finite sample likelihood and statistical decision theory to answer questions of ``why?'' and ``what should you have done?'' using data from randomized experiments and a utility function that prioritizes safety over…
I develop a model of a randomized experiment with a binary intervention and a binary outcome. Potential outcomes in the intervention and control groups give rise to four types of participants. Fixing ideas such that the outcome is…
The number of recurrent events before a terminating event is often of interest. For instance, death terminates an individual's process of rehospitalizations and the number of rehospitalizations is an important indicator of economic cost. We…
The use of instrumental variables for estimating the effect of an exposure on an outcome is popular in econometrics, and increasingly so in epidemiology. This increasing popularity may be attributed to the natural occurrence of instrumental…