Causal Thinking
[ EL036 ]

This course is intended to supplement and build on the causal inference students will have learned in CK010: Study Design and to complement the summer course ESP48: Causal Inference. The approach in this course is different from the other two courses because the focus will be on the reasoning behind causal inference. An important distinction will be made between causal inference, the process behind how one would infer causation from data and inferring causation, the application of causal inference to answer a specific question.

• We will cover three important forms of reasoning: deduction, induction and inference to the best explanation (IBE). Students will see that causal inference is built upon deductive reasoning but that deductive reasoning along is not enough to infer causation. The other forms of reasoning also make appearances in health science and can help with inferring causation.

• We will dig deeper into directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and see how they can help us think more deeply about where our data came from

• We will cover methods that help convince us of the assumptions that are required to infer causation.

Assignment(s), Attendance

T.B.A.