![]() ![]() 6, 7 It is therefore of considerable interest that Pearl, together with Madelyn Glymour and Nicholas Jewell, has now produced a primer Causal Inference in Statistics. However, like War and Peace or Finnegan’s Wake, although most epidemiologists have by now heard of Pearl’s work, we suspect that relatively few have read it, at least not in the form of the original texts. What we previously tried to understand using words, probabilities and numerical examples can now be explored using causal diagrams, so that mind-bending problems such as Berkson’s Bias can be explained and understood relatively easily. 1 The resulting toolkit, particularly the use of counterfactual concepts and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) has been extended by some epidemiologists to remarkable effect, 2, 3 so that some problems which were previously almost intractable can now be solved relatively easily. Pearl’s most striking contribution has been his marriage of the counterfactual and probabilistic approaches to causation. It is perhaps not too great an exaggeration to say that Judea Pearl’s work has had a profound effect on the theory and practice of epidemiology. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |