Related papers: Defining and Estimating Outcomes Directly Averted …
Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…
Causal inference methods can be applied to estimate the effect of a point exposure or treatment on an outcome of interest using data from observational studies. For example, in the Women's Interagency HIV Study, it is of interest to…
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.…
This study assesses the impact of COVID-19 vaccines through an epidemiological model that quantifies their role in pandemic control. We analyze an SIR-based model incorporating vaccination effects and calculate the basic reproduction…
In randomized trials and observational studies, it is often necessary to evaluate the extent to which an intervention affects a time-to-event outcome, which is only partially observed due to right censoring. For instance, in infectious…
Mediation analysis in causal inference has traditionally focused on binary exposures and deterministic interventions, and a decomposition of the average treatment effect in terms of direct and indirect effects. In this paper we present an…
Causal mediation analysis can improve understanding of the mechanisms underlying epidemiologic associations. However, the utility of natural direct and indirect effect estimation has been limited by the assumption of no confounder of the…
We often seek to estimate the causal effect of an exposure on a particular outcome in both randomized and observational settings. One such estimation method is the covariate-adjusted residuals estimator, which was designed for individually…
We investigate stochastic extinction in an epidemic model and the impact of random vaccinations in large populations formulated in terms of an optimal escape path. We find that different random vaccination strategies can have widely…
In this paper we introduce a compartmental epidemic model describing the transmission of the COVID-19 disease in presence of non-mandatory vaccination. The model takes into account the hesitancy and refusal of vaccination. To this aim, we…
Causal indirect and direct effects provide an interpretable method for decomposing the total effect of an exposure on an outcome into the effect through a mediator and the effect through all other pathways. When the mediator is a biomarker,…
The potential waning of the vaccination immunity to COVID-19 could pose threats to public health, as it is tenable that the timing of such waning would synchronize with the near-complete restoration of normalcy. Should also testing be…
Suppose one has data from one or more completed vaccine efficacy trials and wishes to estimate the efficacy in a new setting. Often logistical or ethical considerations make running another efficacy trial impossible. Fortunately, if there…
We estimate patterns of covariation between COVID-19 vaccination rates and a set of widely used indicators of human, social, and economic capital across 146 countries in July 2021 and February 2022. About 70% of the variability in COVID-19…
The sufficient cause framework has been used for decades to improve our understanding of both basic and more complex causal concepts in epidemiology, such as mediation and interaction. Here, we make use of this framework to provide a…
In this study, we examine the perceived influence of others, across both strong and weak social ties, on COVID-19 vaccination decisions in the United States. We add context to social influence by measuring related concepts, such as…
Understanding and quantifying cause and effect is an important problem in many domains. The generally-agreed solution to this problem is to perform a randomised controlled trial. However, even when randomised controlled trials can be…
The estimand framework proposed by ICH in 2017 has brought fundamental changes in the pharmaceutical industry. It clearly describes how a treatment effect in a clinical question should be precisely defined and estimated, through attributes…
We consider a longitudinal data structure consisting of baseline covariates, time-varying treatment variables, intermediate time-dependent covariates, and a possibly time dependent outcome. Previous studies have shown that estimating the…
Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical method in social and medical studies, as it can provide insights about why an intervention works and inform the development of future interventions. Currently, most causal mediation…