Dear All,
We would like to invite you to the next Leeds/Bradford Royal Statistical Society (RSS) meeting on Wednesday 12th February 2014. The meeting will be held at the University of Leeds and is entitled "Some Words of Warning About Causal DAGs".
The meeting will be held from 4-5pm in Worsley Building Seminar Room 9.27, University of Leeds with teas/coffees from 3:30pm. No registration is required and everyone is welcome, membership of RSS is not required to attend.
Johannes Textor - Postdoctoral Fellow, Theoretical Biology & Bioinformatics, Utrecht University
Some Words of Warning About Causal DAGs
Graphical causal models, also known as DAGs, are becoming increasingly popular tools for causal inference in the biomedical and social sciences. However, in contrast to the enthusiasm with which the powerful capabilities of these tools have been embraced, there has been relatively little work on the identification of limitations and potential pitfalls. My talk will illustrate two of these limitations. First, it has been recently claimed that DAG methodology allows for a post-hoc causal interpretation of classic structural equation models (SEM). I show an explicit counterexample to this claim. Second, I consider an a simple causal process from biology which, I argue, cannot be reasonably represented as a DAG, and attempting to do so would lead to wrong conclusions. In summary, while DAGs offer an attractive conceptualization of a given set of causal hypotheses and a powerful calculus to derive testable implications from these hypotheses, further work is needed to precisely identify which real-world causal processes can or cannot be represented as DAGs.
If you require further information please let me know,
Thanks,
Sarah
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Dr. Sarah Fleming
Secretary/Treasurer, RSS Leeds/Bradford Local Group, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, LIGHT, School of Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
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