论文标题
对环境和流行病学应用的空间因果推理方法的综述
A review of spatial causal inference methods for environmental and epidemiological applications
论文作者
论文摘要
因果推理的科学严谨和计算方法对许多学科产生了很大的影响,但直到最近才开始持续到空间应用中。空间休闲推断提出了由于复杂的相关结构和一个位置的治疗之间的干扰以及其他人的结果而引起的分析挑战。在本文中,我们回顾了有关空间因果推断的当前文献,并确定未来工作的领域。我们首先讨论利用空间结构来解释未衡量的混杂变量的方法。然后,我们在存在空间干扰的情况下讨论因果分析,包括用于降低所考虑干扰模式复杂性的几个常见假设。这些方法扩展到时空情况,在该情况下,我们将潜在结果框架与Granger因果关系进行比较和对比,并将涉及处理和反应的空间随机领域的地统计分析进行比较。这些方法是在观察性环境和流行病学研究的背景下引入的,并通过对环境空气污染对COVID-19死亡率的影响进行比较。提供了使用流行的贝叶斯软件敞口的代码来实现许多方法。
The scientific rigor and computational methods of causal inference have had great impacts on many disciplines, but have only recently begun to take hold in spatial applications. Spatial casual inference poses analytic challenges due to complex correlation structures and interference between the treatment at one location and the outcomes at others. In this paper, we review the current literature on spatial causal inference and identify areas of future work. We first discuss methods that exploit spatial structure to account for unmeasured confounding variables. We then discuss causal analysis in the presence of spatial interference including several common assumptions used to reduce the complexity of the interference patterns under consideration. These methods are extended to the spatiotemporal case where we compare and contrast the potential outcomes framework with Granger causality, and to geostatistical analyses involving spatial random fields of treatments and responses. The methods are introduced in the context of observational environmental and epidemiological studies, and are compared using both a simulation study and analysis of the effect of ambient air pollution on COVID-19 mortality rate. Code to implement many of the methods using the popular Bayesian software OpenBUGS is provided.