CENTRE FOR SOCIAL MEDICINE AND COMMUNITY HEALTH
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
organising a lecture on Observational Studies
‘Causal Analysis of London's Cycle Highway to Reduce Heavy Traffic’
By
Kaushik Jana
Assistant Professor
School of Arts and Sciences, Bagchi School of Public Health
Ahmedabad University
DATE- 23 Oct 20204
TIME- 3.30 PM
ROOM NO 206 SSS-II
ABSTRACT- Causal analysis is a statistical technique used to identify cause-and-effect relationships between two variables. Estimating the causal effect of an intervention (treatment), especially in observational studies, can be challenging due to the non-random
assignment of treatments. For treatments affecting an outcome variable that has asymmetric and heavy-tailed distributions, the impact is often more pronounced in the extreme tails rather than at the median. In response to this, we propose a novel statistical method that focuses on estimating treatment effects at the tails of the distribution, accounting for the heavy-tailed nature of the outcome. Our comprehensive study demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach. When applied to London transport data, our framework reveals a significant increase in extreme traffic flow after the introduction of Cycle Superhighways. This insight can aid decision-making processes to enhance traffic network performance and reduce congestion.
SPEAKER - Kaushik Jana is an assistant professor of statistics at Ahmedabad University. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College London (2018-2021) and obtained PhD from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He develops statistical tools to analyse data of different types. He has a distinct preference for research problems that have direct relevance to practical issues and some of his application areas are environment and climate change, public health, cybersecurity
