Covariate adjustment is often used for estimation of population average causal effects (ATE). In recent years graphical rules have been derived for determining, from a causal diagram, all covariate adjustment sets. Restricting attention to causal linear models, a very recent article introduced two graphical criterions: one to compare the asymptotic variance of linear regression estimators that control for certain distinct adjustment sets and a second to identify the optimal adjustment set that provides the smallest asymptotic variance. In this talk, I will show that the same graphical... Read more about Andrea Rotnitzky presents "Efficient adjustment sets for population average causal effect estimation in graphical models"

Abstract: For complex diseases like depression, choosing a successful treatment from several possible drugs remains a trial-and-error process in current clinical practice. By applying statistical machine learning to the electronic health records of thousands of patients, can we discover subtypes of disease which both improve population-wide understanding and improve patient-specific drug recommendations? One popular approach is to represent noisy, high-dimensional health records as mixtures of low-dimensional subtypes via a probabilistic topic model. I will introduce...

Read more about Michael Hughes presents "Discovering Disease Subtypes that Improve Treatment Predictions: Prediction-Constrained Topic Models for Personalized Medicine"

Abstract: Colonial powers typically organized economic activity in the colonies to maximize  their economic returns. While the literature has emphasized long-run negative economic impacts via institutional quality, the changes in economic organization implemented to spur production historically could also directly influence economic organization in the long-run, exerting countervailing effects. We examine these in the context  of the Dutch Cultivation System, the integrated industrial and agricultural system for producing sugar that formed the core of the Dutch...

Read more about Melissa Dell presents "The Development Effects Of The Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System In Java"

Abstract: Television advertisements play an essential role in modern political campaigns with several billion dollars spent in the 2018 general election.  For more than two decades, political scientists have studied TV ads by analyzing the hand-coded data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WAP) and its successor, the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP).  Unfortunately, manually coding hundreds of variables, such as issue mentions, opponent appearance, and negativity, for many videos is a laborious and expensive process.  We propose to automatically code...

Read more about Kosuke Imai presents "Automated Coding of Political Campaign Advertisement Videos: An Empirical Validation Study"