Dear all,
Please join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) this Wednesday, September 12 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel Room 354. Jamie Robins, Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, will give a presentation entitled "A Simple Unification of the Potential Outcome and Causal Graph Approaches to Causal Inference". As always, a light lunch will be provided.
Abstract:
Potential outcomes are extensively used within statistics, epidemiology, and political science for reasoning about causation. Directed acyclic graphs are another formalism used to represent causal systems. They are extensively used in computer science, bioinformatics, sociology and epidemiology. It is natural to wish to unify them.
We present a simple approach to this unification. The approach is based on the idea of splitting nodes to construct graphs whose nodes are potential outcomes. The resulting graph can be used to read off counterfactual independencies. These independencies are satisfied by all previously proposed graphical and nongraphical causal models. We review many examples to illustrate the power of this approach.
This is joint work with Thomas Richardson at the University of Washington.