Casual Inference

Latest Episodes:

Study Critique: What Went Wrong and How We'd Do It Differently | Season 6 Episode 5 May 08, 2025

Show notes

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.

From Model to Meaning with Vincent Arel-Bundock | Season 6 Episode 4 Apr 24, 2025

Show notes

Vincent Arel-Bundock is a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he studies comparative and international political economy.

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/

Follow along on Bluesky:

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.

Propensity Scores, R Packages, and Practical Advice with Noah Greifer | Season 6 Episode 3 Apr 10, 2025

Show notes

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:

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.

Causal Assumptions and Large Language Models | Season 6 Episode 2 Mar 27, 2025

Show notes

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:

The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
Ellie: @EpiEllie
Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.

Data Integration for Impact with Len Testa | Season 6 Episode 1 Feb 28, 2025

Show notes

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:

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade

Starting the Conversation on Models with Alyssa Bilinski | Season 5 Episode 11 Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

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:

PNAS paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2302528120
Shuo Feng's pre-print: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.08.24305335v1
Our uncertainty paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33475686/

Follow along on Twitter:

Alyssa: @ambilinski
The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
Ellie: @EpiEllie
Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp

Flexible methods with Edward Kennedy | Season 5 Episode 10 Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

Edward Kennedy Associate Professor, Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon.

ehkennedy.com
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
Doubly Robust Capture-Recapture Methods for Estimating Population Size: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2023.2187814

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 Cameron Bopp

What Sports and Feminism can tell us about Causal Inference with Sheree Bekker & Stephen Mumford | Season 5 Episode 9 Jun 12, 2024

Show notes

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).
Feminist Sport Lab: https://www.feministsportlab.com
Causation: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum: https://academic.oup.com/book/616
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:

The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
Ellie: @EpiEllie
Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp

Observational Causal Analyses with Erick Scott | Season 5 Episode 8 May 29, 2024

Show notes

Erick Scott is founder of cStructure, a causal science startup. Erick has expertise in medicine, public health, and computational biology.

info@cStructure.io
"A causal roadmap for generating high-quality real-world evidence" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10603361/

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 Cameron Bopp

Friends Let Friends Do Mediation Analysis with Nima Hejazi | Season 5 Episode 7 May 16, 2024

Show notes

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.

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
Nima is on Twitter/X as @nshejazi (https://twitter.com/nshejazi) and my academic webpage is https://nimahejazi.org
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/
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/
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:

The American Journal of Epidemiology: @AmJEpi
Ellie: @EpiEllie
Lucy: @LucyStats

🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
Edited by Cameron Bopp

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