The UCL Health and Society summer school: Social Determinants of Health will be held from Monday 1st July until Friday 5th July 2024.

The summer school is organised by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. It provides an in-depth assessment of the social determinants of health from a global research, policy and governance perspective. Participants will have numerous opportunities for discussion over the one week course.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot will open the summer school with a presentation on the social determinants of health and close the week with a discussion on national and international policy development. 

This course will cover the two main approaches to estimating causal effects from observational data: those based on the assumption of no unmeasured confounding and those that exploit the availability of instrumental variables. The course will cover settings where the exposure/intervention is time fixed and will also give an overview to the more general case when exposures/treatments are time-varying (and hence may be affected by time varying confounding). 

This intermediate course offers a comprehensive understanding of the links between machine learning and traditional methods in causal inference. This course was designed for participants that are familiar with causal inference and the fundamentals of Machine Learning.

Key Topics Covered :

Potential Outcomes: Understand the concept of potential outcomes and how machine learning can be applied to estimate casual effcts in observational studies.

Matching and Instrumental Variables: Explore advanced methods such as matching and instrumental variables to address confounding variables and strengthen casual inference models.

Trees and Regularisations: Learn how decision trees and regularisation techniques can be intergrated into casual analysis, providing participants with tools to handle complex datasets and improve model performance.