Download or read book From Neurons to Neighborhoods written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-11-13 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

Download or read book Estimating Causal Effects from Time Series written by Shu Li and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Estimating Causal Effects in the Presence of Partial Interference Using Multivariate Bayesian Structural Time Series Models written by Fiammetta Menchetti and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Causality written by Carlo Berzuini and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A state of the art volume on statistical causality Causality: Statistical Perspectives and Applications presents a wide-ranging collection of seminal contributions by renowned experts in the field, providing a thorough treatment of all aspects of statistical causality. It covers the various formalisms in current use, methods for applying them to specific problems, and the special requirements of a range of examples from medicine, biology and economics to political science. This book: Provides a clear account and comparison of formal languages, concepts and models for statistical causality. Addresses examples from medicine, biology, economics and political science to aid the reader's understanding. Is authored by leading experts in their field. Is written in an accessible style. Postgraduates, professional statisticians and researchers in academia and industry will benefit from this book.

Download or read book Causality in Time Series Challenges in Machine Learning written by Florin Popescu and published by . This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in the Challenges in Machine Learning series gathers papers from the Mini Symposium on Causality in Time Series, which was part of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) confernce in 2009 in Vancouver, Canada. These papers present state-of-the-art research in time-series causality to the machine learning community, unifying methodological interests in the various communities that require such inference.

Download or read book Interrupted Time Series Analysis written by David McDowall and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrupted Time Series Analysis develops a comprehensive set of models and methods for drawing causal inferences from time series. It provides example analyses of social, behavioral, and biomedical time series to illustrate a general strategy for building AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) impact models. Additionally, the book supplements the classic Box-Jenkins-Tiao model-building strategy with recent auxiliary tests for transformation, differencing, and model selection. Not only does the text discuss new developments, including the prospects for widespread adoption of Bayesian hypothesis testing and synthetic control group designs, but it makes optimal use of graphical illustrations in its examples. With forty completed example analyses that demonstrate the implications of model properties, Interrupted Time Series Analysis will be a key inter-disciplinary text in classrooms, workshops, and short-courses for researchers familiar with time series data or cross-sectional regression analysis but limited background in the structure of time series processes and experiments.

Download or read book Estimating Causal Effects written by Barbara Schneider and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the value of quasi-experimental techniques that can be used to approximate randomized experiments. The goal is to describe the logic of causal inference for researchers and policymakers who are not necessarily trained in experimental and quasi-experimental designs and statistical techniques.

Download or read book Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue Long Term Health and Highway Safety written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are approximately 4,000 fatalities in crashes involving trucks and buses in the United States each year. Though estimates are wide-ranging, possibly 10 to 20 percent of these crashes might have involved fatigued drivers. The stresses associated with their particular jobs (irregular schedules, etc.) and the lifestyle that many truck and bus drivers lead, puts them at substantial risk for insufficient sleep and for developing short- and long-term health problems. Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue, Long-Term Health and Highway Safety assesses the state of knowledge about the relationship of such factors as hours of driving, hours on duty, and periods of rest to the fatigue experienced by truck and bus drivers while driving and the implications for the safe operation of their vehicles. This report evaluates the relationship of these factors to drivers' health over the longer term, and identifies improvements in data and research methods that can lead to better understanding in both areas.

Download or read book The Estimation of Causal Effects by Difference in difference Methods written by Michael Lechner and published by Foundations and Trends(r) in E. This book was released on 2011 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph presents a brief overview of the literature on the difference-in-difference estimation strategy and discusses major issues mainly using a treatment effect perspective that allows more general considerations than the classical regression formulation that still dominates the applied work.

Download or read book Developing a Protocol for Observational Comparative Effectiveness Research A User s Guide written by Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (U.S.) and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This User’s Guide is a resource for investigators and stakeholders who develop and review observational comparative effectiveness research protocols. It explains how to (1) identify key considerations and best practices for research design; (2) build a protocol based on these standards and best practices; and (3) judge the adequacy and completeness of a protocol. Eleven chapters cover all aspects of research design, including: developing study objectives, defining and refining study questions, addressing the heterogeneity of treatment effect, characterizing exposure, selecting a comparator, defining and measuring outcomes, and identifying optimal data sources. Checklists of guidance and key considerations for protocols are provided at the end of each chapter. The User’s Guide was created by researchers affiliated with AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program, particularly those who participated in AHRQ’s DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions About Effectiveness) program. Chapters were subject to multiple internal and external independent reviews. More more information, please consult the Agency website: www.effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov)

Download or read book Elements of Causal Inference written by Jonas Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and self-contained introduction to causal inference, increasingly important in data science and machine learning. The mathematization of causality is a relatively recent development, and has become increasingly important in data science and machine learning. This book offers a self-contained and concise introduction to causal models and how to learn them from data. After explaining the need for causal models and discussing some of the principles underlying causal inference, the book teaches readers how to use causal models: how to compute intervention distributions, how to infer causal models from observational and interventional data, and how causal ideas could be exploited for classical machine learning problems. All of these topics are discussed first in terms of two variables and then in the more general multivariate case. The bivariate case turns out to be a particularly hard problem for causal learning because there are no conditional independences as used by classical methods for solving multivariate cases. The authors consider analyzing statistical asymmetries between cause and effect to be highly instructive, and they report on their decade of intensive research into this problem. The book is accessible to readers with a background in machine learning or statistics, and can be used in graduate courses or as a reference for researchers. The text includes code snippets that can be copied and pasted, exercises, and an appendix with a summary of the most important technical concepts.

Download or read book Causal Analysis in Population Studies written by Henriette Engelhardt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central aim of many studies in population research and demography is to explain cause-effect relationships among variables or events. For decades, population scientists have concentrated their efforts on estimating the ‘causes of effects’ by applying standard cross-sectional and dynamic regression techniques, with regression coefficients routinely being understood as estimates of causal effects. The standard approach to infer the ‘effects of causes’ in natural sciences and in psychology is to conduct randomized experiments. In population studies, experimental designs are generally infeasible. In population studies, most research is based on non-experimental designs (observational or survey designs) and rarely on quasi experiments or natural experiments. Using non-experimental designs to infer causal relationships—i.e. relationships that can ultimately inform policies or interventions—is a complex undertaking. Specifically, treatment effects can be inferred from non-experimental data with a counterfactual approach. In this counterfactual perspective, causal effects are defined as the difference between the potential outcome irrespective of whether or not an individual had received a certain treatment (or experienced a certain cause). The counterfactual approach to estimate effects of causes from quasi-experimental data or from observational studies was first proposed by Rubin in 1974 and further developed by James Heckman and others. This book presents both theoretical contributions and empirical applications of the counterfactual approach to causal inference.

Download or read book Handbook of Statistical Modeling for the Social and Behavioral Sciences written by G. Arminger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors thoroughly survey the most important statistical models used in empirical reserch in the social and behavioral sciences. Following a common format, each chapter introduces a model, illustrates the types of problems and data for which the model is best used, provides numerous examples that draw upon familiar models or procedures, and includes material on software that can be used to estimate the models studied. This handbook will aid researchers, methodologists, graduate students, and statisticians to understand and resolve common modeling problems.

Download or read book Applied Econometrics with R written by Christian Kleiber and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: R is a language and environment for data analysis and graphics. It may be considered an implementation of S, an award-winning language initially - veloped at Bell Laboratories since the late 1970s. The R project was initiated by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s, and has been developed by an international team since mid-1997. Historically, econometricians have favored other computing environments, some of which have fallen by the wayside, and also a variety of packages with canned routines. We believe that R has great potential in econometrics, both for research and for teaching. There are at least three reasons for this: (1) R is mostly platform independent and runs on Microsoft Windows, the Mac family of operating systems, and various ?avors of Unix/Linux, and also on some more exotic platforms. (2) R is free software that can be downloaded and installed at no cost from a family of mirror sites around the globe, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN); hence students can easily install it on their own machines. (3) R is open-source software, so that the full source code is available and can be inspected to understand what it really does, learn from it, and modify and extend it. We also like to think that platform independence and the open-source philosophy make R an ideal environment for reproducible econometric research.

Download or read book Explainable Predictive Modeling and Causal Effect Estimation from Complex Time varying Data written by Tsung Yu Hsieh and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time-varying data are prevalent in a wide variety of real-world applications for example health care, environmental study, finance, motion capture among others. Time-varying data possess complex nature and pose unique challenges. For example, time-varying data observed in real-world applications almost always exhibit nonstationary characteristics that challenges ordinary time-series methods with stationary assumptions. In addition, one may only have access to irregularly sampled data which prohibits the models that assume regularly observed samples. On the other hand, as machine learning and data mining algorithms have begun make an impact on real-world applications, merely providing accurate prediction is no longer sufficient. There is a growing need for interpretations and explanations to how the machine learning models make predictions in order for end-users to fully trust and adopt these models. In this thesis, we explore time-varying data in various practical scenarios and aim at enhancing model explainability and understanding of the data. First, we study the problem of building explainable classifiers for multivariate time series data by means of joint variable and time interval selection. We introduce a modular framework, the LAXCAT model, consisting of a convolution-based feature extraction and a dual attention mechanism. The convolution-based feature extraction network produces variable-specific representation by considering local time interval context. The dual attention mechanisms, namely variable attention network and temporal attention network, work in concert to simultaneously select variable and time interval that are discriminative to the classification task. We present results of extensive experiments with several benchmark data sets that show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on multi-variate time series classification task. The results of our case studies demonstrate that the variables and time intervals identified by the proposed method make sense relative to available domain knowledge. Second, to obtain a better understanding of the input multivariate time series data, we study dynamic structure learning which aims at jointly discovering hidden state transitions and state-dependent inter-variable connectivity structures. To address the research problem, we introduce a novel state-regularized dynamic autoregressive model framework, the SrVARM model, featuring a state-regularized recurrent neural network and a dynamic autoregressive model. The state-regularized recurrent unit learns to discover the hidden state transition dynamics from the data while the autoregressive function learns to encode state-dependent inter-variable dependencies in directed acyclic graph structure. A smooth characterization of the acyclic constraint is exploited to train the model in an efficient and unified framework. We report results of extensive experiments with simulated data as well as a real-world benchmark that show that SrVARM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recovering the unobserved state transitions and discovering the state-dependent relationships among variables. Third, functional data analysis provides another promising perspective at dealing with time-vary data. However, the representation learning capability of neural network-based method have not been fully explored for functional data. We study unsupervised representation learning from functional data and introduce the functional autoencoder network which generalizes the standard autoencoder network to the functional data setting. The functional autoencoder copes with functional data input by leveraging functional weights and inner product for real-valued functions. We derive from first principles, a functional gradient-based algorithm for training the resulting network. We present results of experiments which demonstrate that the functional autoencoders outperform the state-of-the-art baseline methods. Besides providing a solution to the problem of functional data representation learning, the proposed model offers a fundamental building block for other functional data learning tasks, such as classification and regression networks. Fourth, we study the problem of treatment effect estimation from networked time series data. Such data arise in settings where individuals are linked by a network of relations, e.g., social ties, and the observations for each individual are naturally represented by time series. We propose a novel representation learning approach to treatment effect estimation from networked time series data consisting of a temporal convolution network, a graph attention network, and a treatment-specific outcome predictor network. We use an adversarial learning framework for domain adaptation to learn a representation of individuals that makes treatment assignment independent of the treatment outcome. We present results of experiments and show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in estimating treatment effects from networked time series data. We conclude with a brief summary of the main contributions of the thesis and some directions for further research.

Download or read book The Book of Why written by Judea Pearl and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Regression Analysis and Causal Inference written by Henning Best and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ′The editors of the new SAGE Handbook of Regression Analysis and Causal Inference have assembled a wide-ranging, high-quality, and timely collection of articles on topics of central importance to quantitative social research, many written by leaders in the field. Everyone engaged in statistical analysis of social-science data will find something of interest in this book.′ - John Fox, Professor, Department of Sociology, McMaster University ′The authors do a great job in explaining the various statistical methods in a clear and simple way - focussing on fundamental understanding, interpretation of results, and practical application - yet being precise in their exposition.′ - Ben Jann, Executive Director, Institute of Sociology, University of Bern ′Best and Wolf have put together a powerful collection, especially valuable in its separate discussions of uses for both cross-sectional and panel data analysis.′ -Tom Smith, Senior Fellow, NORC, University of Chicago Edited and written by a team of leading international social scientists, this Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to multivariate methods. The Handbook focuses on regression analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal data with an emphasis on causal analysis, thereby covering a large number of different techniques including selection models, complex samples, and regression discontinuities. Each Part starts with a non-mathematical introduction to the method covered in that section, giving readers a basic knowledge of the method’s logic, scope and unique features. Next, the mathematical and statistical basis of each method is presented along with advanced aspects. Using real-world data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), the book provides a comprehensive discussion of each method’s application, making this an ideal text for PhD students and researchers embarking on their own data analysis.