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SUMMARY:Rothschild Public Lecture: Forty years of causal inference: Report
  of a great-grandfather - James Robins (Harvard University)
DTSTART:20260526T150000Z
DTEND:20260526T160000Z
UID:TALK246322@talks.cam.ac.uk
DESCRIPTION:Forty years ago\, the following disciplines had their own lang
 uages\, opinions and idiosyncrasies re causal inference: philosophy\, comp
 uter science\, sociology\, psychology\, statistics\, epidemiology\, politi
 cal science\, and economics. Today all speak a common language. Top journa
 ls have gone from knee-jerk rejection to active solicitation of articles o
 n causal inference.&nbsp\;&nbsp\;&nbsp\; The ongoing rapid development of 
 the field has been driven by:\n1.End of the historical suppression of caus
 al language in statistics and medicine (aside from randomized clinical tri
 als)\n2.The internet making cross disciplinary understanding and collabora
 tion easy\n3.The need for individualized treatment regimes in Medicine\n\n
 Tech companies realizing that optimizing profits depended on causal interv
 entions rather than just prediction\nThe development of causal graphs that
  offers non-technical users the ability to validly reason about complex ca
 usal systems\nThe existence of huge data sets leading to data driven scien
 ce rather than hypothesis driven science.\n\nIn my lecture\, I will give a
  history of statistical methods for causal inference\, focusing on methods
  developed by myself and colleagues. I will explain why causal methods hav
 e had such a large impact in substantive areas in which confounding by tim
 e varying covariates is very strong\, as in studies of HIV-infected indivi
 duals. These causal methods are also an integral part of the target trial 
 methodology - a methodology that is altering the analytical paradigm for t
 he estimation of causal effects from longitudinal observational data in Me
 dicine and Public Health.&nbsp\; I will conclude with a discussion of the 
 future of causal inference in the coming age of AI.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Newton Institute
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