Abstract The Mantel-Haenszel estimators for the common effect parameters of stratified 2×2 tables have been widely adopted in epidemiological and clinical studies for controlling the effects of confounding factors. Although the Mantel-Haenszel estimators are simple and effective estimating...

Abstract Marginal Structural Models (MSMs), with the associated method of inverse probability weighting (IPW), have become increasingly popular in epidemiology to model and estimate the joint effects of a sequence of exposures. This popularity is largely related to the relative simplicity of the...

Abstract We develop a transport formula for predicting overall cumulative vaccine efficacy through time t ( $$VE(t)$$ ) to prevent clinically significant infection with a genetically diverse pathogen (e. g., HIV infection) in a new setting for which a Phase III preventive vaccine efficacy...

Abstract To obtain statistical inference about interaction hypotheses without making strong distributional assumptions, permutation tests based on permuting the outcomes are often being used. It was shown that in continuous and binary data these tests might not be even approximately valid and...

Abstract An issue that remains challenging in the field of causal inference is how to relax the assumption of no interference between units. Interference occurs when the treatment of one unit can affect the outcome of another, a situation which is likely to arise with outcomes that may depend on...

Abstract A fundamental probabilistic equivalence between randomized experiments and observational studies is presented. Given a detailed scenario, the reader is asked to consider which of two possible study designs provides more information regarding the expected difference in an outcome due to...

Abstract In conducting studies on an exposure of interest, a systematic roadmap should be applied for translating causal questions into statistical analyses and interpreting the results. In this paper we describe an application of one such roadmap applied to estimating the joint effect of both...

Abstract Individual-level models (ILMs) are a class of complex, statistical models that are often fitted within a Bayesian framework, and which can be suitable for modeling infectious disease spread. The deviance information criterion (DIC) is a model comparison tool that is appropriate for...

Abstract Separating the effects of ages, periods, and cohorts is a classic problem not only in epidemiology but also in demography and the social sciences in general. Frost provides a classic example in epidemiology that I use as an empirical example. In the classic age–period–cohort (APC)...