May 31, 2023
Lauren Eyler Dang, recent CTML graduate, and Laura Balzer, Associate Professor, discuss the relative merits of two frameworks for causal Inference: Target Trial Emulation (TTE), which is currently receiving a lot of press, and the Causal Roadmap, developed by Maya Petersen and Mark van der Laan at Berkeley.
Lauren and Laura conclude that while TTE is a helpful starting place for formulating causal questions, it has significant shortcomings. In contrast, the Causal Roadmap is applicable to any design, accommodates a wide set of identification assumptions, emphasizes objective selection of the estimation approach, and protects against over-interpretation of results.
The Causal Roadmap is the foundation for UC Berkeley's Intro to Causal Inference course, which won the 2014 Education in Causality Award from the American Statistical Association and is publicly available at https://ctml.berkeley.edu/introduction-causal-inference