Papers › Causal health impacts of power plant emission controls under modeled and uncertain...
Causal health impacts of power plant emission controls under modeled and uncertain physical process interference
Nathan B. Wikle, Corwin M. Zigler
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Causal inference with spatial environmental data is often challenging due to the presence of interference: outcomes for observational units depend on some combination of local and non-local treatment. This is especially relevant when estimating the effect of power plant emissions controls on population health, as pollution exposure is dictated by (i) the location of point-source emissions, as well as (ii) the transport of pollutants across space via dynamic physical-chemical processes. In this work, we estimate the effectiveness of air quality interventions at coal-fired power plants in reducing two adverse health outcomes in Texas in 2016: pediatric asthma ED visits and Medicare all-cause mortality. We develop methods for causal inference with interference when the underlying network structure is not known with certainty and instead must be estimated from ancillary data. Notably, uncertainty in the interference structure is propagated to the resulting causal effect estimates. We offer a Bayesian, spatial mechanistic model for the interference mapping which we combine with a flexible non-parametric outcome model to marginalize estimates of causal effects over uncertainty in the structure of interference. Our analysis finds some evidence that emissions controls at upwind power plants reduce asthma ED visits and all-cause mortality, however accounting for uncertainty in the interference renders the results largely inconclusive.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections