Abstract An exciting new direction in HIV research is centered on using molecular phylogenetics to understand the social and behavioral drivers of HIV transmission. SPOT was an intervention designed to offer HIV point of care testing to men who have sex with men at a community-based site in...

Abstract Data mining and machine learning techniques such as classification and regression trees (CART) represent a promising alternative to conventional logistic regression for propensity score estimation. Whereas incomplete data preclude the fitting of a logistic regression on all subjects,...

Abstract In randomized cancer screening trials where asymptomatic individuals are assigned to undergo a regimen of screening examinations or standard care, the primary objective typically is to estimate the effect of screening assignment on cancer-specific mortality by carrying out an...

Abstract Background Causal mediation analysis can improve understanding of the mechanisms underlying epidemiologic associations. However, the utility of natural direct and indirect effect estimation has been limited by the assumption of no confounder of the mediator-outcome relationship that is...

Abstract Compartmental model diagrams have been used for nearly a century to depict causal relationships in infectious disease epidemiology. Causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) have been used more broadly in epidemiology since the 1990s to guide analyses of a variety of public health problems....

Abstract Routinely collected administrative and clinical data are increasingly being utilized for comparing quality of care outcomes between hospitals. This problem can be considered in a causal inference framework, as such comparisons have to be adjusted for hospital-specific patient case-mix,...

Abstract In a recent BMJ article, the authors conducted a meta-analysis to compare estimated treatment effects from randomized trials with those derived from observational studies based on routinely collected data (RCD). They calculated a pooled relative odds ratio (ROR) of 1.31 (95 %...

Abstract A unified theory is developed for attributable proportion (AP) and population attributable fraction (PAF) of joint effects, marginal effects or interaction among factors. We use a novel normalization with a range between –1 and 1 that gives the traditional definitions of AP or PAF...

Abstract The Fetal–Infant mortality rate (FIMR) is the basic surveillance statistic in perinatal periods of risk (PPOR) analyses. This paper presents a model for the FIMR as the ratio of two Poisson random variables. From this model, expressions for estimators of variance, standard error, and...

Abstract Objectives: The current study aims to estimate the causal effect of increasing levels of urbanisation on mean SBP, and to decompose the direct and indirect effects via hypothesised mediators. Methods: We analysed data from 5, 840 adults (≥ 18 years) from the Andhra Pradesh Children...