Resources for Causal Reasoning in Health Services Research

Interventional probability

the probability of outcome of a deliberately set intervention; a truncated form of factorization of the joint probability function in which the conditional probability for intervened variables is replaced with 1, and all other conditional probabilities are considered at set values of the intervened variables

Marginal structural models

link the expected value of a counterfactual outcome to covariates; unlike in regression models, the expected value is not conditional on the covariates

Markov assumption

conditional on its parents, a variable is independent of any other variable in the directed acyclic graph

Mediation

production of effect through a third variable

Positivity

definition

Propensity score

the probability of treatment given baseline characteristics

Randomness

the lack of deterministic pattern in occurrence