Lecture notes. Written from the material of Berkeley Stat 156, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. These are notes, not a transcript: the material has been reorganised and rewritten. This adaptation carries the same licence, and the original is linked above.
7. Course Reading Guide¶
What this covers¶
This chapter is not taught material — it is the course's own reading plan, reproduced so that a reader working through this book knows which textbook chapter each part of the course was assigned against. Berkeley STAT 156/256 (Causal Inference), Fall 2024, was built on two textbooks, read in parallel and interleaved lecture by lecture. Assumes nothing beyond wanting a map from lecture to chapter.
The texts¶
- Peng Ding, A First Course in Causal Inference. A preprint is freely available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.18793.
- James M. Robins and Miguel A. Hernán, Causal Inference: What If. Available online at https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/.
Most lectures were assigned a chapter of Ding alone; several paired it with the corresponding section or chapter of Robins and Hernán.
Readings by lecture¶
| Lecture | Reading |
|---|---|
| Lecture 1 | Ding, Ch. 1 |
| Lecture 2 | Ding, Ch. 2 |
| Lecture 3 | Robins & Hernán, §2.1; Ding, Ch. 3 |
| Lecture 4 | Ding, Ch. 4–6 |
| Lecture 5 | Ding, Ch. 7–9 |
| 9/17 | Robins & Hernán, Ch. 3; Ding, Ch. 10 |
| 9/19 | Robins & Hernán, §2.4; Ding, Ch. 11–12 |
| 9/24 | Ding, Ch. 12; Robins & Hernán, Ch. 13 |
| 9/26 | Ding, Ch. 13 |
| 10/01 | Robins & Hernán, Ch. 4; Ding, Ch. 15 |
| 10/03 | Robins & Hernán, Ch. 6–7 |
| 10/08 | Robins & Hernán, Ch. 16; Ding, Ch. 16 |
| 10/10 | Ding, Ch. 21–22 |
| 10/15 | no reading — class time set aside for group projects |
| 10/17 | Ding, Ch. 23, 25 |
| 10/22 | Ding, Ch. 20 |
| 10/24 | Ding, Ch. 24 |
| 10/29 | no lecture — in-class midterm |
| 10/31 | Ding, Ch. 17–18 |
| 11/5 | Ding, Ch. 19 |
| 11/7 | Ding, Ch. 26 |
| 11/12 | Robins & Hernán, Ch. 23; Ding, Ch. 27 |
| 11/14 | no lecture — BSTARS (Berkeley Statistics Annual Research Symposium) |
| 11/19 | Ding, Ch. 28 |
| 11/21 | Ding, Ch. 29 |
Sources¶
The entire chapter is drawn from one page: the course home page,
statistics/berkeley/stat156/fall-2024/home.md (converted from index.qmd of the
berkeley-stat156/fall-2024 repository, CC BY-NC 4.0). Every reading listed above is stated there,
lecture note by lecture note, in the order given.
Dropped as administrivia, per the page but not reproduced here: the arXiv-discount promotion code and print-edition purchase link for the Ding text, notices that homeworks 2–6 were posted to the Homeworks tab, a Gradescope grading-policy note, a pointer to presentation guidelines for the 256 students, and the closing schedule of project presentations on 12/3 and 12/5 (which carried no reading). The course's Homeworks tab and Video presentations tab, referred to on the page, are not themselves part of this material.
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