Open access
Aug 2026
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...
G. Hettinger, Audrey Renson, Herbert P. Susmann et al.
· Observational Studies · 0 citations