Advanced Training Courses Were Held at the R. F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research

This year's course topic is "Methods of Statistical Causal Inference".

The course "Methods of Statistical Causal Inference" was held in Moscow from 19th to 24th of August, 2024. Lectures and seminars for students were held by Boris Sokolov, a Leading Research Fellow at the LCSR and a candidate of political sciences.

The courses brought together participants and listeners from Moscow and St. Petersburg, including students, staff and postgraduates from the Moscow and St. Petersburg campuses of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, as well as Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Listeners learned about the key principles of causal inference theory, a rapidly developing branch of data science. The concepts and methods developed within this theory are widely used in many academic disciplines including, among others, demography, criminology, marketing, political science, psychology, sociology, economics, and epidemiology, as well as in commercial practice and public administration.

The course covered the following topics:

−     Theory of Potential Outcomes (also known as Rubin Causal Model);

−     Theory of Causal Diagrams, or Directed Acyclic Graphs; the main types of experimental designs and methods for their statistical analysis;

−     Matching and Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting; instrumental variables

−     Discontinuity Design;

−     “Difference–in–differences” method.