Causal Tools Project

It’s been a while since our last newsletter and things are happening. As you might have noticed we have a new name, Causal Tools Project, rather than the TWANG (Toolkit for Weighting and Analysis of Nonequivalent Groups) Project. We have the same goals—to develop tools to support causal inferences from observational studies building on the TWANG package in multiple statistical computing environments—but with a new NIDA funded project we have changed our name to emphasize our goal to support causal modeling rather than our specific software package. This newsletter will catch you up on our recent activities with an overview of what’s available online now, what’s new, and what’s coming up!

If you'd like to receive future updates from the Causal Tools Project, please subscribe.

All tutorials are available to download here: http://www.rand.org/statistics/twang/tutorials.html

• TWANG Short Course/Educational Videos: This series of three training videos provides researchers and analysts with an overview of causal inference and the role of propensity scores in analysis. The videos provide step-by-step procedures for implementing propensity score analyses involving two or more treatment groups using the TWANG (Toolkit for Weighting and Analysis of Nonequivalent Groups) data analysis package.
• R Tutorials for using ps, mnps, and iptw commands
• SAS Tutorials for %ps and %mnps commands
• Stata Tutorials for ps and mnps commands

A list of workshops can be found here: http://www.rand.org/statistics/twang/workshops.html

Members of the TWANG project team will be conducting a series of workshops in 2019 to help those without any experience in propensity scores, as well as more advanced users, gain hands-on experience to estimate propensity score weights using boosted models in R, SAS, and Stata.

American Statistical Association (ASA) Traveling Short Course Series

Guidelines for Using State-of-the-Art Methods to Estimate Propensity Score and Inverse Probability of Treatment Weights When Drawing Causal Inferences

Presenters: Beth Ann Griffin, Daniel McCaffrey, Lane Burgette, Matt Cefalu, Donna Coffman, Brian Vegetabile.

Locations: TBA

Dates: 2019