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Fakultät Statistik
Studierende sitzt am Arbeitsplatz und schaut auf den Laptop. © Aliona Kardash​/​TU Dortmund

Guest Lecture by Prof. Thomas Alexander Gerds on "Causal inference in continuous time"

Picture of Prof. Thomas Gerds
Prof. Thomas Gerds
Prof. Thomas Alexander Gerds from the University of Copenhagen is visiting our department as part of the tu.hosts program and will give a guest lecture on "Causal inference in continuous time"
  • Start: 10.06.2026 10:00 Uhr
  • End: 10.06.2026, 12:00 Uhr
  • Location: IBZ (Emil-Figge-Straße 59, 44227 Dortmund)

Many challenges in the statistical analysis of clinical and health-care data arise from their time-dependent nature, particularly in analyses aiming to estimate treatment effects from observational longitudinal data. Individuals start, stop, pause, and change treatments or other intervenable exposures for different reasons. Importantly, changes in treatment and confounding factors occur on person-specific time scales, and the ordering of these events varies across individuals. When treatment decisions and covariates evolve over time, the hazard ratios obtained from standard time-dependent Cox models generally lack a straightforward causal interpretation.

In this talk, Thomas Gerds will discuss how evolving risk sets, treatment histories, and intermediate covariates can be simulated in continuous time. Using the continuous-time framework developed in recent methodological work on longitudinal causal models, he will review the definition of causal estimands in the presence of truncation by death and discuss statistical methods for estimating these estimands. Prof. Gerds will further illustrate how discretization of continuously evolving processes affects both estimation and interpretation in practical applications.

The guest lecture on Causal inference in continuous time will take place on June 10, 2026 at 10:00 AM in the IBZ (Emil-Figge-Straße 59, 44227 Dortmund). Everyone interested is welcome to attend.

Thomas Alexander Gerds is Professor in Biostatistics at the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He works mainly on the theory and the applications of statistical methods for binary, longitudinal and time-to-event-data. He is visiting our doctoral researcher Maria Thurow through the tu.hosts program of the Graduiertenzentrum, which allows doctoral researchers to invite international scientists. Prof. Gerds works in many different research areas and has numerous interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from different fields.