Online Lectures

Dr. Maclure walks us through his creative and very visual explanation of propensity scores.

Is understanding propensity scores a headache for you? Join the crowd! You’ve heard of crowd-sourcing, this is crowd-sorting. Imagine you are in a crowd of 216 people who have packed a lecture theatre for a day-long course on managing migraines. Dr. Maclure guides us through a pictorial explanation of how the people in the theatre can be sorted into groups based on confounding variables such as drinking coffee and smoking. He then shows how to balance the different groups by matching. This is a very concrete and visual example of how propensity scores can be used in observational studies.

In this talk, Dr. Dormuth offers a great introduction to why and how to use propensity scores.

“As epidemiologists and data analysts doing observational studies, only you can control confounding.” When randomization is not an option, we need to develop other methods to get at the right result when we have potential confounding variables that cannot be removed with a coin toss. The propensity score is a numerical technique for addressing confounding in the association between the exposure and the outcome. This talk is a great introduction to why and how to use propensity scores.