Design of Experimental and Non-Experimental Seminar Series – 3/8
Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy Design of Experimental and Non-Experimental Studies Seminar Series Speaker: Jennifer Hill, PhD Professor of Applied Statistics, Co-Department Chair,Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and HumanitiesNew York University Friday, March 8th, 2024 11:00AM – 12:00PM HCP Conference Room 224E , 180 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA Join via Zoom Password: 450871 Democratizing Causal Inference Causal inference is a necessary goal in research for addressing many of the most pressing questions around policy and practice. However, we know that it is difficult to create situations where we can be confident in our causal claims. In the past decade, causal methodologists have increasingly been capitalizing on and touting the benefits of more complicated machine learning algorithms to estimate causal effects. These methods can take some of the guesswork out of analyses, decrease the opportunity for “p-hacking,” and may be better suited for more fine-tuned tasks such as identifying varying treatment effects and generalizing results from one population to another. But they also fail to resolve some of the most pressing questions (should we ever believe an ignorability assumption) and raise additional questions. Should these more advanced methods change our fundamental views about how difficult it is to infer causality? Do sufficient guardrails exist to ensure appropriate use and interpretation? How can we provide tools that make it easy for non-technical researchers to use these new methods in a responsible way? I will discuss these issues, and describe a new tool aimed at addressing some of these questions. I’ll also present results from ongoing research that sheds light on ways we can support applied researchers in both doing better research and being transparent about their assumptions and methods.
