Review and improve the SCC chapter

[mbcann01]

Overview

In the Fall of 2023, I moved over a bunch of stuff from PowerPoint slides (nearly) verbatim. I was in a rush, so I told myself to move it just move it over and improve it later.

This chapter needs a lot of beefing up. Maybe just start with translating chapter 3 of Modern Epidemiology.

The causalpie package

Currently, the causalpie package isn't working. I submitted and issue here. If I get time, I may try to fix it myself. For now, I will have to just use the PowerPoint slides.

Left off at

2023-10-06: Moved over the PP slides. There is still a lot of cleaning up to do.

Tasks

• [ ] Start with an SCC example that doesn't have any unknown causes. Doesn't even have to be disease-related. This will more easily allow us to explain how disease occurs at the moment the final component cause happens.
• [ ] Add a note about how "smoking" and "pollution" are not nearly specific enough.
• [ ] We need to add a lot of information to the section on Rothman's model of sufficient and component causes.
• [ ] Make causal pies directly in R. Maybe use the causalpie package?
• [ ] Improve the flow of the RMSCC section.

[mbcann01]

Text for the causalpie package

CC models can be really useful, and Malcolm Barrett developed an R package we can use to create them. Let's first walk through creating a SCC pie, and then discuss how we can use it to reason about causal inference.

# Load the packages we will need below
library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)
library(causalpie)