Short courses
2023 ASA Traveling Short Course
"Fundamentals of Causal Inference: With R"
October 20 (Friday), 2023, 9:00 am - 4:30 pm, CST
Registration
Click here to register for the short course on Eventbrite. The registration is closed.
Registration fee (tax is excluded; a $5 late registration fee will be applied after October 6, 2023):
Student: $40
ASA member: $60
Non-ASA member: $70
The registration fee includes a one-day parking permit, light refreshments during coffee breaks, and a lunch box.
Location
The short course will be held at UT Dallas, the Science Learning Center (SLC), Room 2.302, in the morning and the Erik Jonsson Academic Center (JO), Room 4.614, in the afternoon.
A one-day parking permit is available upon request. Park in green parking spots (conveniently in Lots A, B, C, and D).
Click here to access the interactive UT Dallas campus map.
utd_map_2.pdfAbout the course
One of the primary motivations for clinical trials and observational studies of humans is to infer cause and effect. Disentangling causation from confounding is of utmost importance. Fundamentals of Causal Inference: With R explains and relates different methods of confounding adjustment in terms of potential outcomes and graphical models, including standardization, doubly robust estimation, difference-in-differences estimation, and instrumental variables estimation. Several real data examples, simulation studies, and analyses using R motivate the methods throughout. The course assumes familiarity with basic statistics and probability, regression, and R. The course will be taught with a blend of lecture and worked examples.
Module 1: Introduction (105 mins)
Definitions and datasets
Potential outcomes framework
Directed acyclic graphs
Module 2: Adjusting for confounding I (105 mins)
Standardization
Difference-in-differences estimation
Module 3: Adjusting for confounding II (105 mins)
Front-door estimation
Instrumental variable estimation
Comparisons of the four methods
Module 4: More advanced topics (45 mins)
Mediation
Time-dependent confounding
Agenda (Tentative)
8:45 - 9:00 am: Check-in
9:00 - 9:05 am: Introduction
9:05 - 10:50 am: Module 1 (105 mins)
10:50 - 11:00 am: Coffee break
11:00 - 11:59 am: Module 2 (60 mins)
12:00 - 1:00 pm: Lunch
1:00 - 2:45 pm: Module 2 (45 mins) and Module 3 (60 mins)
2:45 - 3:00 pm: Coffee break
3:00 - 4:30 pm: Module 3 (45 mins) and Module 4 (45 mins)
About the instructor
Babette Brumback, Ph.D., is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. Her statistical research has concentrated on methods for longitudinal data analysis, causal modeling, bias adjustment, and analysis of data from complex sampling designs. She has also collaborated extensively on public health and medical studies concerning a broad array of research areas. Her professional activities include serving in 2014-2016 as Chair Elect, Chair, and Past Chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Epidemiology, serving in 2015—2016 as President of the Florida Chapter of the American Statistical Association, serving from 2011-2015 as a member of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Clinical and Integrative Cardiovascular Sciences, and serving in 2016-2017 on an Advisory Panel for the MMS Program of the National Science Foundation. She has also served as Associate Editor of Biometrics and as Statistical Editor of Psychosomatic Medicine. Dr. Brumback received her PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, followed by postdoctoral training in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1996-1999. She is an elected member of Delta Omega and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Sponsers
