SORA / TABA Annual Workshop 2016
& DLSPH Biostatistics Research Day

Welcome to SORA / TABA Annual Workshop 2016 and DLSPH Biostatistics Research Day

The Division of Biostatistics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH) is pleased to host the “SORA-TABA Workshop and the DLSPH Biostatistics Research Day”. The event is intended to bring together the regional and local statistical communities who are interested in biostatistics, financial statistics and other applied areas of statistics. Please join us in making this SORA-TABA-DLSPH joint event a great success!

The workshop will include poster presentations by participants; students and post-docs are particularly encouraged to present their research or practicum work, and three poster awards will be given at the closing ceremony. There will be a career panel discussion which is aimed to provide graduate students with career-building advises. The organization of this workshop represents a joint effort between DLSPH and the following organizations: the Southern Ontario Regional Association of SSC, the Southern Ontario Chapter of ASA, the Applied Biostatistics Association, York University and McDougall Scientific, and Statistics Society of Canada.

We look forward to meeting you in Toronto.

Workshop Committee

Workshop Theme

This year workshop theme is about causal inference particularly propensity score methods using weighting and regression adjustments. Causal inference attempts to uncover the structure of the data and eliminate all non-causative explanations for an observed association. Most inference problems in biostatistics seek to uncover causal relationships, which is hindered by issues such as confounding in non-experimental data or non-compliance in randomized studies. This workshop will introduce fundamental principles in causal inference, with a particular focus on the propensity score. The propensity score and the concept of covariate balance will be considered. Theoretical properties of propensity score based estimators will be considered, focusing first on marginal and conditional effects of a time-fixed treatment and then proceeding to the more complex setting of time-varying treatments.

Dr. Erica E. M. Moodie and Dr. David A. Stephens