Dr. Grace S. Chiu, Professor, Virginia Institute of Marine Science presents LaCSH: A Spatial and Causal Framework for Modeling Socio-Economic Health

Date: Thursday, October 5, 2023

Start time: 3:00 pm

End time: 4:00 pm

Location: Harris Hall room 4119

Audience: All are welcome to attend

We develop a model-based Latent Causal Socioeconomic Health (LaCSH) index, with uncertainty bounds, at the national level. Extending the latent health factor index (LHFI) modeling approach to assess ecosystem health, LaCSH integratively models the hierarchical relationship among the nation’s societal health or well-being (latent / intangible), socio-economic metrics (e.g., GDP), the covariates that drive the notion of well-being (e.g., natural resources), and a continuous variable that reflects policy (e.g., government mandated maternity leave days). In addition to making statistical inference for socio-economic health, LaCSH facilitates the evaluation of any causal impact of the policy on health. A formal spatial component in the LaCSH framework allows us to compare the socio-economic health of countries around the world based on various metrics, covariates, and two different policy variables that pertain to socio-economic well-being. This is joint work led by FS Kuh with AHWestveld (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.12217)

Bio

Dr. Grace S. Chiu is a professor at VIMS with a broad research interests including Bayesian / hierarchical / spatial / temporal / mixed-effects modeling of complex environmental / ecological / biological phenomena, statistical model-based assessment of ecological / biological / policy systems, integration of statistical and process / simulation models via Bayesian melding, causal modeling, and etc..

Sponsor(s): SSOR

Event contact: Dr. Ya Su, suyaf@vcu.edu