Hi everyone!
This week at the Applied Statistics Workshop we will be welcoming *Francesca
Dominici*, Professor of Statistics at the Harvard School of Public Health
and Co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. She will be
presenting work entitled *Data Science and Our Environment*. Please find
the abstract below and on the Applied Stats website here
<https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009>.
As usual, we will meet at noon in CGIS Knafel Room 354 and lunch will be
provided. See you all there!
-- Dana Higgins
*Title:* * Data Science and Our Environment *
*Abstract:* What if I told you I had evidence of a serious threat to
American national security – a terrorist attack in which a jumbo jet will
be hijacked and crashed every 12 days. Thousands will continue to die
unless we act now. This is the question before us today – but the threat
doesn’t come from terrorists. The threat comes from climate change and air
pollution.
We have developed an artificial neural network model that uses on-the-
ground air-monitoring data and satellite-based measurements to estimate
daily pollution levels across the continental U.S., breaking the country up
into 1-square- kilometer zones. We have paired that information with health
data contained in Medicare claims records from the last 12 years, and for
97% of the population ages 65 or older. We have developed statistical
methods and computational efficient algorithms for the analysis over
460 million health records.
Our research shows that short and long term exposure to air pollution is
killing thousands of senior citizens each year. This data science platform
is telling us that federal limits on the nation’s most widespread air
pollutants are not stringent enough. This type of data is the sign of a new
era for the role of data science in public health, and also for
the associated methodological challenges. For example, with enormous
amounts of data, the threat of unmeasured confounding bias is amplified,
and causality is even harder to assess with observational studies. These
and other challenges will be discussed.
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