Guest lecture by Juha Karvanen on November 24th

Professor Juha Karvanen from University of Jyväskylä, will hold a presentation on Efficient data collection and causal inference. The lecture will take place on Monday, 24th of November at 15:00 in the seminar room 469, Publicum 4th floor.

Abstract: The pressure of cost-efficiency often leads to the study designs where the data are not collected as a simple random sample from the population. It is essential to take the study design into account when the causal effects are estimated on the population level. If the study design and the missing data mechanism are complicated, the estimation task is non-trivial and may benefit from a systematic approach.

Causal models with design describe the study design and the missing data mechanism together with the causal structure and allow the direct application of causal calculus in the estimation of the causal effects. Conclusions whether a causal or observational relationship can be estimated from the collected incomplete data can be made directly from the graph. The flow of the study is visualized by ordering the nodes of the causal diagram in two dimensions by their causal order and the time of the observation. Causal models with design offer a systematic and unifying view scientific inference and increase the clarity and speed of communication. Examples on the causal models for a case-control study, a nested case-control study, a clinical trial and a two-stage case-cohort study are presented.