- Emily: @emilyriederer.bsky.social
- Ellie: @epiellie.bsky.social
- Lucy: @lucystats.bsky.social
Casual Inference
Episodes
Combining Data & Making Effects Generalizable with Carly Brantner | Season 6 Episode 7
Carly Brantner is an assistant professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke University and Duke Clinical Research Institute.
Resources from this episode:- multicate: R package for estimating conditional average treatment effects across one or more studies using machine learning methods
- PCORnet® Front Door: Access point for potential investigators, patient groups, and other stakeholders to connect with PCORnet and get support for potential research studies
- Patient-Centered Outcomes Data Repository (PDOCR): De-identified data from 24 (and counting) PCORI-funded studies
- Carly: @carlybrantner.bsky.social
- Ellie: @epiellie.bsky.social
- Lucy: @lucystats.bsky.social
- Vincent's "What is your estimand" section in his {marginaleffects} book: https://marginaleffects.com/chapters/challenge.html#sec-goals_estimand
- Article on defining estimands: https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211004187
- Andrew's marginal effects post: https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2022/05/20/marginalia/
- Andrew's post on "fixed effects" and mariginal effects across different disciplines: https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2022/11/29/conditional-marginal-marginaleffects/
- Andrew: @andrew.heiss.phd
- Ellie: @epiellie.bsky.social
- Lucy: @lucystats.bsky.social
Study Critique: What Went Wrong and How We'd Do It Differently | Season 6 Episode 5
In this episode Lucy and Ellie dig into a recently publicized paper, "Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid", which has gained attention after being promoted by RFK Jr. as evidence that vaccines cause autism.
Ellie breaks down her Substack critique of the study. Together, she and Lucy discuss the methodological flaws and what a better version of this study might look like.
- Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid: https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/vaccination-and-neurodevelopmental-disorders-a-study-of-nine-year-old-children-enrolled-in-medicaid/
- RFK Jr is promoting a new study claiming "vaccines cause autism" but it doesn't add up. Literally [Ellie's substack]: https://epiellie.substack.com/p/rfk-jr-is-promoting-a-new-study-claiming
Follow along on Bluesky:
- Ellie: @epiellie.bsky.social
- Lucy: @lucystats.bsky.social
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.
- Vincent's website: https://arelbundock.com/
- Vincent's book "Model to Meaning: How to Interpret Statistical Models With marginaleffects for R and Python": https://marginaleffects.com/
- Vincent: @vincentab.bsky.social
- Ellie: @epiellie.bsky.social
- Lucy: @lucystats.bsky.social
Propensity Scores, R Packages, and Practical Advice with Noah Greifer | Season 6 Episode 3
Noah Greifer is a statistical consultant and programmer at Harvard University.
Episode notes:
- WeightIt package: https://ngreifer.github.io/WeightIt/
- MatchIt package: https://kosukeimai.github.io/MatchIt/
- Noah's awesome Stack Exchange post: https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/544958
Follow along on Bluesky:
- Noah: @noahgreifer.bsky.social
- Ellie: @EpiEllie.bsky.social
- Lucy: @LucyStats.bsky.social
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.
Lucy and Ellie chat about large language models, chat interfaces, and causal inference.
- Do LLMs Act as Repositories of Causal Knowledge?: https://arxiv.org/html/2412.10635v1
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.
Lucy chats with Len Testa about a recent analysis he did which combined over 150 publicly available data sources to answer a question about the affordability of Disney World.
- Len's Deep Dive Post on the Touring Plans Blog [Blog Post]
- Wall Street Journal Artcile, "Even Disney Is Worried About the High Cost of a Disney Vacation" [Article]
Follow along on Bluesky:
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Ellie: @EpiEllie.bsky.social
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Lucy: @LucyStats.bsky.social
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Starting the Conversation on Models with Alyssa Bilinski | Season 5 Episode 11
Alyssa Bilinski, Peterson Family Assistant Professor of Health Policy, and Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, at Brown University School of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing novel methods for policy evaluation and applying these to identify interventions that most efficiently improve population health and well-being.
Episode notes:
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PNAS paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2302528120
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Shuo Feng's pre-print: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.08.24305335v1
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Our uncertainty paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33475686/
Follow along on Twitter:
- Alyssa: @ambilinski
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Edward Kennedy Associate Professor, Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon.
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Evaluating a Targeted Minimum Loss-Based Estimator for Capture-Recapture Analysis: An Application to HIV Surveillance in San Francisco, California: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/193/4/673/7425624
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Doubly Robust Capture-Recapture Methods for Estimating Population Size: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2023.2187814
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
What Sports and Feminism can tell us about Causal Inference with Sheree Bekker & Stephen Mumford | Season 5 Episode 9
Sheree Bekker & Stephen Mumford are Co-directors of the Feminist Sport Lab and have a book coming soon: "Open Play: the case for feminist sport", coming Spring 2025. Reaktion Books (UK), University of Chicago Press (US).
Sheree Bekker: Associate Professor, University of Bath, Department for Health,
Stephen Mumford, Professor of Metaphysics, Durham University A
- Author of Dispositions (Oxford, 1998), Russell on Metaphysics (Routledge, 2003), Laws in Nature (Routledge, 2004), David Armstrong (Acumen, 2007), Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011), Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford, 2011 with Rani Lill Anjum), Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012) and Causation: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013 with Rani Lill Anjum). I was editor of George Molnar's posthumous Powers: a Study in Metaphysics (Oxford, 2003) and Metaphysics and Science (Oxford, 2013 with Matthew Tugby).
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Feminist Sport Lab: https://www.feministsportlab.com
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Causation: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum: https://academic.oup.com/book/616
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Faye Norby, Iditarod champion & epidemiologist: https://www.kfyrtv.com/2024/03/28/faye-norby-finishes-iditarod-trail-womens-foot-champion/?outputType=amp
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Erick Scott is founder of cStructure, a causal science startup. Erick has expertise in medicine, public health, and computational biology.
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info@cStructure.io
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"A causal roadmap for generating high-quality real-world evidence" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10603361/
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Friends Let Friends Do Mediation Analysis with Nima Hejazi | Season 5 Episode 7
Nima Hejazi is an assistant professor in biostatistics at Harvard University. His methodological work often draws upon tools and ideas from semi- and non-parametric inference, high-dimensional and large-scale inference, targeted or debiased machine learning (e.g., targeted minimum loss estimation, method of sieves), and computational statistics.
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Surprised by the Hot Hand Fallacy? A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers by Joshua B. Miller & Adam Sanjurjo: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44955325
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Nima is on Twitter/X as @nshejazi (https://twitter.com/nshejazi) and my academic webpage is https://nimahejazi.org
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Recent translational review paper (intended for the infectious disease science community) I was involved in describing some causal/statistical frameworks for evaluating immune markers as mediators / surrogate endpoints: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38458870/
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The tlverse software ecosystem is on GitHub at https://github.com/tlverse and the tlverse handbook is freely available at https://tlverse.org/tlverse-handbook/
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Dr. Hejazi annually co-teaches a causal mediation analysis workshop at SER, and notes from the latest offering are freely available at https://codex.nimahejazi.org/ser2023_mediation_workshop/
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Aaditya Ramdas is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Departments of Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include game-theoretic statistics and sequential anytime-valid inference, multiple testing and post-selection inference, and uncertainty quantification for machine learning (conformal prediction, calibration). His applied areas of interest include neuroscience, genetics and auditing (real-estate, finance, elections). Aaditya received the IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize, the COPSS Emerging Leader Award, the Bernoulli New Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Sloan fellowship in Mathematics, and faculty research awards from Adobe and Google. He also spends 20% of his time at Amazon working on causality and sequential experimentation.
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Aaditya's website: https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~aramdas/
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Game theoretic statistics resources
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Aaditya's course, Game-theoretic probability, statistics, and learning:
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Papers of interest:
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Time-uniform central limit theory and asymptotic confidence sequences: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06476
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Game-theoretic statistics and safe anytime-valid inference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01948
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Discussion papers:
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Safe Testing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07801
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Testing by Betting: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article/184/2/407/7056412
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Estimating means of bounded random variables by betting: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssb/article/86/1/1/7043257
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Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Cookies, Causal Inference, and Careers with Ingrid Giesinger #Epicookiechallenge | Season 5 Episode 5
Ingrid is a doctoral student in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Analyzing the Analysts: Reproducibility with Nick Huntington-Klein | Season 5 Episode 4
Nick Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Albers School of Business and Economics, Seattle University. His research focus is econometrics, causal inference, and higher education policy. He's also the author of an introductory causal inference textbook called The Effect and the creator of a number of Stata packages for implementing causal effect estimation procedures.
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Nick's book, online version: https://theeffectbook.net/
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The Paper of How: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/W2FMEESMMSJMWDEZYY8Y?target=10.1111/obes.12598
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Nick's twitter & BlueSky: @nickchk
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Nick's website: https://nickchk.com
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
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The Clone-Censor-Weight Method in Pharmacoepidemiologic Research: Foundations and Methodological Implementation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40471-024-00346-2
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Immortal time in pregnancy: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36805380/
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Mark van der Laan is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on developing statistical methods to estimate causal and non-causal parameters of interest, based on potentially complex and high dimensional data from randomized clinical trials or observational longitudinal studies, or from cross-sectional studies.
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Center for Targeted Learning, Berkeley: https://ctml.berkeley.edu/
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A causal roadmap: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37900353/
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Short course on causal learning: https://ctml.berkeley.edu/introduction-causal-inference
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Handbook on the TLverse (Targeted Learning in R): https://ctml.berkeley.edu/publications/targeted-learning-handbook-causal-machine-learning-and-inference-tlverse-r-software
- Mark on twitter: @mark_vdlaan
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Ellie and Lucy kick off the season and introduce our new executive buzzer, Melita! Melita is a masters student in statistics at Wake Forest University and will be helping out with the podcast (and keeping Lucy and Ellie from using too much jargon!)
Pros & Cons of RCT paper:
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Fernainy, P., Cohen, A.A., Murray, E. et al. Rethinking the pros and cons of randomized controlled trials and observational studies in the era of big data and advanced methods: a panel discussion. BMC Proc 18 (Suppl 2), 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12919-023-00285-8
Follow along on Twitter:
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The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
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Ellie: @EpiEllie
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Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Ralph D'Agostino Sr. and Ralph D'Agostino Jr. about their careers in statistics, looking back at how things have developed and forward at where they see the world of statistics and epidemiology going.
Ralph D'Agostino Sr. was a professor of Mathematics/Statistics, Biostatistics, and Epidemiology at Boston University. He was the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study, a biostatistical consultant to The New England Journal of Medicine, an editor of Statistics in Medicine and lead editor of their Tutorials, and a member and consultant on FDA committees. His major fields of research were clinical trials, prognostic models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research.
Ralph D'Agostino Jr. is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest University where he is the Director of the Biostatistics Core of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Methodologically his research includes developing statistical techniques for evaluating data from observational settings, handling missing data in applied problems, and developing predictive functions to identify prospectively patients at elevated risk for future negative outcomes. Some of his recent work includes the development of methods using propensity score models to identify safety signals in large retrospective databases.
Ellie and Lucy chat with Dr. Cat Hicks, VP of Research Insights and Director of Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight Flow, about evidence science.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Cat: @grimalkina
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about a "Causal Quartet" and spend some extra time on M-Bias!
Lucy, Travis, & Malcom's Causal Quartet Paper
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about ENAR 2023 and Targeted Learning!
Targeted Learning in R Handbook
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with #EpiCookieChallenge winner, Viktoria Gastens!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Viktoria: @VikiGastens
- Viktoria's Lab: @PopHealthLabCH
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about confounding!
✍️ Lucy's new paper: Sensitivity Analyses for Unmeasured Confounders
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Randomized Controlled Trials: Efficacy versus Effectiveness, Safety vs Safetiness | Season 4 Episode 6
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about randomized controlled trials, thinking about efficacy vs effectiveness and saftey vs safetiness.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
The Value of Instrumental Variables with Maria Glymour | Season 4 Episode 5
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Maria Glymour, Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatstics at UCSF and incoming chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University. Maria successfully convinces Ellie and Lucy that instrumental variables can be very useful in epidemiology.
Follow up:
✍️ Andrew Heiss's blog post on marginal and conditional effects for GLMMs
Follow along on Twitter:
- Maria Glymour: @MariaGlymour
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Methods chat about personalized medicine and positivity in causal inference | Season 4 Episode 4
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about critiquing methods research, average treatment effects, and positivity violations!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Hot takes and logistic regression love with Travis Gerke | Season 4 Episode 3
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Travis Gerke, Director of Data Science at The Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium (PCCTC). This episode has lots of hot takes and lots of love for logistic regression!
Follow along on Twitter:
- Travis Gerke: @travisgerke
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Counterfactual Thinking: Biomarkers, Napster, and Ice-T | Season 4 Episode 2
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about counterfactuals!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Population and Biomedical Data Science with Enrique Schisterman | Season 4 Episode 1
In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Enrique Schisterman, Perelman Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, about the future of epidemiology.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Enrique: @eschisterman1
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
What is the value of a p-value with Charlie Poole and Chuck Scales | Season 3 Episode 13
In this episode we play the audio from a recent panel discussion co-sponsored by UNC TraCS, Duke University and Wake Forest U CTSA Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) Cores. The panelists were Charles Poole (Associate Professor of Epidemiology, UNC) Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, and Charles Scales (Associate Professor of Surgery, Duke University) and it was facilitated by Marcella Boynton (Assistant Professor, General Internal Medicine, UNC/NC TraCS).
🎥 The video of the panel can be found here
📃 The ASA Statement on p-values
📃 The American Statistician issue on p-values following the SSI conference
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Sander Greenland, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology and Statistics at UCLA.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
The Intersection of Industrial Engineering and Causal Inference with Toyya Pujol | Season 3 Episode 11
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Toyya Pujol, Operations Researcher at RAND Corporation.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Toyya: @toyyapujol
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
The Intersection of Machine Learning and Causal Inference with Maggie Makar | Season 3 Episode 10
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Maggie Makar, Presidential postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Maggie: @Maggiemakar
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Quinn Rose: aspiringrobot.com
Artificial Intelligence, Personalized Medicine, and Causal Bounds with Judea Pearl | Season 3 Episode 9
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Judea Pearl, Chancellor professor of computer science and statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Judea: @yudapearl
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
The history of John Snow, Cholera, and Cookies with Chris Schaich | Season 3 Episode 8
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with #EpiCookieChallenge winner, Chris Schaich about the epidemiologist John Snow. Dr. Schaich is an assistant professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine in the Hypertension and Vascular Research Center.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Chris: @Chris_Schaich
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Asking questions that matter, getting answers that help | Season 3 Episode 7
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about their Spotify Wrapped for Casual Inference, and Ellie Murray talks about causal inference for complex data with the University of Minnesota's epidemiology department.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5
Transcript (auto-generated): https://bit.ly/3y4OskQ
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about the history of causal inference, tracing the origins across disciplines from statistics to economics, epidemiology, and computer science, discussing contributions from Rubin, Robins, Pearl, and more!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
Hanging out in the data science trough of disillusionment with Hilary Parker | Season 3 Episode 5
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Hilary Parker about design thinking for data analysis, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the potential data behind baby Yoda.
Follow along on Twitter:
- Hilary: @hspter
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Noah Haber about metascience, causal language in the literature, and more!
🥇 Causal Inference Nobel Prize Press Release
📝 What Should Researchers Expect When They Replicate Studies? A Statistical View of Replicability in Psychological Science
📝 Design principles of data analysis
📝 Causal language and strength of inference in academic and media articles shared in social media (CLAIMS): A systematic review
🔗 Reading past headlines [part 1]
🔗 Reading past headlines [part 2]
Follow along on Twitter:
- Noah: @NoahHaber
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
Solving Optimization Problems in Healthcare and Disney Theme Parks with Len Testa | Season 3 Episode 3
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Len Testa, president of TouringPlans, about solving optimization problems in travel and healthcare.
📦 Lucy's R package with touringplans data
Len's slide on model choices:
Follow along on Twitter:
- Len: @LenTesta
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
Causal Inference and Network Science for Public Health with Ashley Buchanan | Season 3 Episode 2
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Ashley Buchanan about causal inference with a focus on networks. Dr. Buchanan is an assistant professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at the University of Rhode Island.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
Coronavirus Rapid Tests Sensitivity, Specificity, Messaging, and Use Cases | Season 3 Episode 1
In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan do a series recap and then discuss sensitivity, specificity, and appropriate messaging in the context of coronavirus rapid tests.
📝 NY Times article: One in 5,000
🐦 Kareem Carr's tweet about omitted variable bias in randomized controlled trials
📝 Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
🦠 A calculator that lets you estimate COVID risk [microcovid]
In the (Local) News
📰 Will Podcasting and Social Media Replace Journals and Traditional Science Communication? No, but...
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
In this 23rd episode of Casual Inference Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about fixed vs random effect, complete a statistics challenge, and talk about DAGs.
🐦 Tweet from @jtc475 about fixed vs random effects terminology
🎲 This is Statistics March Randomness Challenge
📝 Lucy, Kyra, and Ellie's paper "Quantifying Uncertainty in Infectious Disease Mechanistic Models"
PeDAGogy
Here are the two Bridgerton DAGs we discussed.
1. Tweet submitted by @IGMoore:
2. Tweet submitted by @AlenaSorensen
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Julia Raifman about health policy, a recent study on unemployment insurance and food insecurity, and anti racism in academia. Dr. Raifman is an assistant professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management at Boston University. Her research focuses on how health and social policies drive population health and health disparities.
📝 Geoffrey Rose's paper Sick Individuals and Sick Populations
PeDAGogy
Come up with a Bridgerton DAG and share it with us on Twitter! Here is one for inspiration.
Me: "Hi please fund me to do innovative research"
— Gareth Griffith (@Garethjgriffith) February 1, 2021
Also me: "Sure I'll lead a DAG discussion on the @PWGTennant et al. @IJEeditorial paper... I'd like to focus on how offensively hot the guy from Bridgerton is."@mrc_ieu and @BristolTARG PhD student Mark Gibson made my day! pic.twitter.com/CFOoYhMGjt
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Julia: @JuliaRaifman
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Celebrating 100 years with a look forwards and back with the D'Agostinos | Season 2 Episode 3
In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Ralph D'Agostino Sr. and Ralph D'Agostino Jr. about their careers in statistics, looking back at how things have developed and forward at where they see the world of statistics and epidemiology going. We're excited to kick off the 100th year of the American Journal of Epidemiology with this episode.
Ralph D'Agostino Sr. is a professor of Mathematics/Statistics, Biostatistics, and Epidemiology at Boston University. He has been the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study, a biostatistical consultant to The New England Journal of Medicine, an editor of Statistics in Medicine and lead editor of their Tutorials, and a member and consultant on FDA committees. His major fields of research are clinical trials, prognostic models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research.
Ralph D'Agostino Jr. is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest University where he is the Director of the Biostatistics Core of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Methodologically his research includes developing statistical techniques for evaluating data from observational settings, handling missing data in applied problems, and developing predictive functions to identify prospectively patients at elevated risk for future negative outcomes. Some of his recent work includes the development of methods using propensity score models to identify safety signals in large retrospective databases.
It also turns out they are Lucy's father and grandfather, so we have 3 generations of statisticians on the pod!
We also have Amit Sasson on to discuss the winning cookie from the #EpiCookieChallenge as well as her work in causal inference!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
In honor of the Society for Epidemiologic Research 2020 Meeting, the hosts of four epidemiology podcasts came together to record the first ever "crossover event" to talk about their experiences recording our shows and what podcasting can bring to the table for the field of epidemiology. Join the hosts of Epidemiology Counts (Bryan James), SERiousEPi (Matt Fox, Hailey Banack), Casual Inference (Lucy D'Agostino McGowan), and Shiny Epi People (Lisa Bodnar) as they engage in a fun and informative (we hope!) conversation of the burgeoning field of epidemiology podcasting, emceed by Geetika Kalloo.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about ecological studies, the new Pfizer vaccine interim analysis, and more!
📈 Vanderbilt University Department of Health Policy's COVID-19 Deaths in Tennessee and Adoption of Mask Requirements (h/t Peter Rebeiro)
📈 The original masks v no masks graph
🗞 Pfizer's press release about the interim analysis for their vaccine trial
📓 Pfizer's vaccine trial protocol
PeDAGogy
Here is the DAG from our peDAGogy segment:
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Why Everyone is Excited About Causal Inference These Days with Roger Peng | Episode 18
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about communicating uncertainty, how air pollution policy is determined, and whether causal inference is a fad with Dr. Roger Peng from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Roger: @rdpeng
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Thinking About Schools Reopening From a Causal Perspective with Emily Oster | Episode 17
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan talk about the causal questions linked to schools opening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then they have Dr. Emily Oster, professor of economics at Brown University, on to discuss her thoughts on and contributions to this area.
📄 Emily's Atlantic Piece Schools aren't super-spreader events
📊 COVID-19 School Response Dashboard
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Emily: @profemilyoster
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan casually discuss linear versus logistic regression, prediction versus inference, generalized linear models, and more!
📄Robin Gomila's paper: "Logistic or linear? Estimating causal effects on experimental treatments on binary outcomes using regression analysis"
🐦 Robin's twitter thread about the paper
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Methodological Advances in Causal Inference with Betsy Ogburn | Episode 15
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss methodological advancement in causal inference with Dr. Elizabeth Ogburn from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
📄 Wang & Blei's The Blessings of Multiple Causes paper
🦠 COVID-19 Collaboration Platform
📈 COVID-19 Meta-dashboard of dashboards
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Betsy: @BetsyOgburn
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan are live for Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) week!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Community Engagement, Health Disparities, and Measure Development with Melody Goodman | Episode 13
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss community engagement, health disparities, and measure development with Dr. Melody Goodman from New York University Global School of Public Health.
🐦 Jonathan Jackson's tweet on the importance of measures of dispersion
📄 Goodman's paper Reaching Consensus on Principles of Stakeholder Engagement in Research
📄 Goodman's paper Content validation of a quantitative stakeholder engagement measure
📄 Goodman's paper on Community Research Training Fellows Program Training Community Members in Public Health Research: Development and Implementation of a Community Participatory Research Pilot Project
📄 The Relationship between In-Person Voting, Consolidated Polling Locations, and Absentee Voting on Covid-19: Evidence from the Wisconsin Primary discussed in the peDAGogy segment
Harm reduction tips for protests
Harm reduction tips for faith-based communities
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Melody: @goodmanthebrain
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat about coronavirus, the evidence we have about masks, and designing observational studies.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss Bayesian statistics, model validation, and more, with special guest Dr. Frank Harrell from the Department of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University.
🤷♀️What does it mean to be Bayesian?
🤷♀️How can we decide if our models are good?
📈Frank's COVID trial resource hub
📈Betsy Ogburn's COVID trial protocol hub
👨🏫Frank's Free Biostatistics in Biomedical Research Course
🐍Lucy's tweetorial on Type 1 error and including nonlinear terms in models
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Frank: @f2harrell
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss coronavirus a bit more, focusing on mask wearing, data quality, disease modeling, and more!
📈 IHME COVID-19 projections
😷 A quick DIY cloth mask how-to
😷 Ellie's TikTok on safe mask removal
🧪 Lucy's tweetorial on estimating prevalences from testing data
🤷♀️ Lucy's model uncertainty tweetorial
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan discuss coronavirus with an added segment discussing current recommendations for people taking ACE inhibitors or ARBS with Andrew South from Wake Forest School of Medicine.
👏Wash your hands to Splash Mountain Medley:
🌟 Ellie's hand washing song lyrics (to be sung twice)
Twinkle twinkle little SARS
How I wonder where you are
Are you on my hands right now?
On my face or on my brow?
Twinkle twinkle little SARS
How I wonder where you are
🔗 Nephrology Journal Club information about ACEi/ARBS and coronavirus
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Andrew: @asouth_neph
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Sean Taylor from Lyft.
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📝 Sean's Science paper
📦 Prophet R package
📝 Book on time-varying exposures
📝 Lyft engineering blog
📝 Hormone replacement therapy overview
📝 Analyzing observational HRT data by emulating a trial
📰 Local news
- AJE Methods Corner
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Sean: @SeanJTaylor
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Whitney Robinson from the Departments of Epidemiology at University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📝 Jeffrey Rose article (reprint)
📝 Chandra Ford's public health praxis paper
📝 Whitney's paper with Tyler VanderWeele on race as a cause
📝 Miguel Hernan's paper on well-defined interventions: Does water kill?
📝 NIH funding paper
📻 Acadames podcast
📝 Miguel Hernan's AJE paper on selection bias without colliders
📰 Local news
- We talk about novel Coronavirus and how you can get answers to your questions
- 📝We also chat about the infectious disease listserv ProMed Mail
- 📝 And the BlueDot "artificial epidemiologist".
PeDAGogy:
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Whitney: @WhitneyEpi
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Elizabeth Stuart from the Departments of Mental Health, Biostatistics, and Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📝 Article by Sherri Rose on Liz Stuart (baby pics!)
📰 Local news
- Naomi Distelkamp won our #EpiCookieChallenge!
- Naomi plotted flu rates in the US
- We discussed Alberto Cairo's book How Chart's Lie
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Liz: @LizStuartDC
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist studying at the University of Wollongong and a science communication writer for the Guardian, Observer, and more!
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📝 Gideon's post on relative versus absolute risk
🐦 Gideon's twitter account @justsaysrisks
🎙Gideon's Sensationalist Science Podcast
📧 Email Gideon for advice on getting started in Sci Comm: gidmk.healthnerd@gmail.com
👩🏫 PeDAGogy
- We discussed a paper recently published in BMJ on the association between arts engagement and mortality
- Andrew Heiss tweeted a DAG with a proposed relationship between opera and longevity
- Robert Platt also tweeted about this, suggesting that there may be an explanation other than confounding
📰 Global news
- The New York Times wrote an article on the BMJ paper that we discussed in peDAGogy
- Here is some info on the BMJ Christmas Issue
- Lucy and Jeff Leek's clickbait-y Ted-ed lesson on clickbait
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Gid: @GidMK
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Matt Fox from the Departments of Epidemiology and Global Health at Boston University.
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📄 Paper discussing a null association between smoking during pregnancy and breast cancer risk
📚 Matt's textbook on quantitative bias analysis
🔗 Bias analysis website: sites.google.com/site/biasanalysis/
📰 Global news
- Wang and Blei's The Blessing of Multiple Causes
- Obgurn, Shpitser, and Tchetgen Tchetgen's Comment
- D'Amour's Comment
In this week's global news segment we mentioned M-bias. Here is an example DAG of this phenomenon:
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Matt: @ProfMattFox
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Sherri Rose from the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📄 Paper by Anna Zink and Sherri Rose: Fair Regression for Health Care Spending
📄 The Blessing of Multiple Causes
📄 Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations
📚 Sherri's books on targeted learning
🔗 Sherri's website: drsherrirose.org
🔗 Data for Black lives: d4bl.org
👏 What we're is enjoying this week: baby Yoda
📰 Our local news: American Journal of Epidemiology article: a machine learning primer for epidemiologists
PeDAGogy segment:
In this weeks segment, Ellie describes a collider!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Sherri: @sherrirose
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
👩🎨 Our artwork is by Allison Horst.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Onyebuchi Arah from the Department of Epidemiology and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health about Social Epidemiology.
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode:
📄 Study in Science Advances demonstrating the funding gap in research on the community level
📄 Matt Fox's E-value study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology
👏 What Lucy is enjoying this week: Normcore tech newsletter
📰 Our local news: American Journal of Epidemiology article on obesity & neighborhoods
Here is the DAG discussed in the peDAGogy segment:
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Onyebuchi: @oacarah
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan try to keep it casual in the first episode of the new Casual Inference podcast. Episode 1 features special guest Miguel Hernan from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Listen to learn how to improve your observational data analysis!
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
- Miguel: @_MiguelHernan
Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
Here are some links to the content we talk about in this episode!
Causal Inference, What If: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/
AJE article on applying the target trial method: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/188/8/1569/5486454
AJE tweetorial on that article: https://twitter.com/AmJEpi/status/1171866941906026496
News report on the Economics Nobel Prize: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/economics-nobel-honors-trio-taking-experimental-approach-fighting-poverty
Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan try to keep it casual in this quick teaser to introduce you to the types of things the Casual Inference podcast will include.
Follow along on Twitter:
- The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
- Ellie: @EpiEllie
- Lucy: @LucyStats
Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.