G. Hettinger

Beyond “No Unmeasured Confounding”: Challenges and Opportunities for Cornfield-Style Reasoning in Modern Causal Inference

Abstract:Jerome Cornfield's (1959) analysis of smoking and lung cancer introduced a foundational principle for causal inference from observational data: causal conclusions should be evaluated not by the absence of assumption violations, but by the implausibility of the violations required to overturn them. In the decad...