Related papers: Prenatal alcohol exposure and child cognition: sem…
Methods for causal inference are well developed for binary and continuous exposures, but in many settings, the exposure has a substantial mass at zero-such exposures are called semi-continuous. We propose a general causal framework for such…
Evidence from animal models and epidemiological studies has linked prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) to a broad range of long-term cognitive and behavioral deficits. However, there is virtually no information in the scientific literature…
Perinatal epidemiology often aims to evaluate exposures on infant outcomes. When the exposure affects the composition of people who give birth to live infants (e.g., by affecting fertility, behavior, or birth outcomes), this "live birth…
While it is well known that high levels of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) result in significant cognitive deficits in children, the exact nature of the dose response is less well understood. In particular, there is a pressing need to…
Psychiatric and social epidemiology often involves assessing the effects of environmental exposure on outcomes that are difficult to measure directly. To address this problem, it is common to measure outcomes using a comprehensive battery…
Recently, there has been great interest in estimating the conditional average treatment effect using flexible machine learning methods. However, in practice, investigators often have working hypotheses about effect heterogeneity across…
The health effects of environmental exposures have been studied for decades, typically using standard regression models to assess exposure-outcome associations found in observational non-experimental data. We propose and illustrate a…
Although review papers on causal inference methods are now available, there is a lack of introductory overviews on what they can render and on the guiding criteria for choosing one particular method. This tutorial gives an overview in…
We propose a framework for testing the homogeneity of conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) across multiple experimental and observational studies. Our approach leverages multiple randomized trials to assess whether treatment…
In estimating the causal effect of a continuous exposure or treatment, it is important to control for all confounding factors. However, most existing methods require parametric specification for how control variables influence the outcome…
I introduce heterogeneity into the analysis of peer effects that arise from conformity, allowing the strength of the taste for conformity to vary across agents' actions. Using a structural model based on a simultaneous network game with…
The problem we consider considers estimating a multivariate longitudinal panel data model whose outcomes can be a combination of discrete and continuous variables. This problem is challenging because the likelihood is usually analytically…
Causal inference analyses often use existing observational data, which in many cases has some clustering of individuals. In this paper we discuss propensity score weighting methods in a multilevel setting where within clusters individuals…
The generalized propensity score (GPS) is an extension of the propensity score for use with quantitative or continuous exposures (e.g., dose of medication or years of education). Current GPS methods allow estimation of the dose-response…
Estimating the joint effect of a multivariate, continuous exposure is crucial, particularly in environmental health where interest lies in simultaneously evaluating the impact of multiple environmental pollutants on health. We develop novel…
Long-term causal inference has drawn increasing attention in many scientific domains. Existing methods mainly focus on estimating average long-term causal effects by combining long-term observational data and short-term experimental data.…
In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…
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…
Standard causal inference characterizes treatment effect through averages, but the counterfactual distributions could be different in not only the central tendency but also spread and shape. To provide a comprehensive evaluation of…
The use of twins designs to address causal questions is becoming increasingly popular. A standard assumption is that there is no interference between twins---that is, no twin's exposure has a causal impact on their co-twin's outcome.…