Abstract Compartmental model diagrams have been used for nearly a century to depict causal relationships in infectious disease epidemiology. Causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) have been used more broadly in epidemiology since the 1990s to guide analyses of a variety of public health problems....

Abstract Routinely collected administrative and clinical data are increasingly being utilized for comparing quality of care outcomes between hospitals. This problem can be considered in a causal inference framework, as such comparisons have to be adjusted for hospital-specific patient case-mix,...

Abstract We provide a scheme for inferring causal relations from uncontrolled statistical data based on tools from computational algebraic geometry, in particular, the computation of Groebner bases. We focus on causal structures containing just two observed variables, each of which is binary. We...

In causal inference for longitudinal data, standard methods usually assume that the underlying processes are discrete time processes, and that the observational time points are the time points when the processes change values. The identification of these standard models often relies on the...

Two-stage predictor substitution (2SPS) and the two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) are two approaches to instrumental variable (IV) analysis. While 2SPS and 2SRI with linear models are well-studied methods of causal inference, the properties of 2SPS and 2SRI for logistic binary outcomes have...

This thesis examines causal inference related topics involving intermediate variables, and uses Bayesian methodologies to advance analysis capabilities in these areas. First, joint modeling of outcome variables with intermediate variables is considered in the context of birthweight and censored...

After treatment is found to be effective in a clinical study, attention often focuses on the effect of treatment duration on outcome. Such an analysis facilitates recommendations on the most beneficial treatment duration. In many studies, treatment duration is left to the discretion of the...

This article aims to answer to what extent fertility has a causal effect on households’ economic wellbeing—an issue that has received considerable interest in development studies and policy analysis. However, only recently has this literature begun to give importance to adequate modelling...