Event History Analysis with R

Chapter 9

Causality and Matching

9.1 Introduction

Causality is a concept that statisticians and statistical science traditionally shy away from. Recently, however, many successful attempts have been made to include the concept of causality in the statistical theory and vocabulary. A good review of the topic, from a modern event history analysis point of view, is given in Aalen et al. (2008), Chapter 9. Some of their interesting ideas are presented here.

The traditional standpoint among statisticians was that “we deal with association and correlation, not causality”; see Pearl (2000) for a discussion. An exception was the clinical trial, and other situations, where randomization could be used as a tool. However, during the last couple of decades, ...