Health Economists' Study Group (HESG) Winter 2026
Pre-Conference Course (9am-12pm Wednesday 14 January): Introduction to Machine Learning for Causal Inference
This session will be free to attend for anyone registered for the full HESG meeting. Please indicate your attendance by ticking the relevant box when you register via the link above.
Overview and learning objectives
This course provides an overview of and hands-on experience with machine learning (ML) methods. The focus of this course will be on ML for causal inference (e.g., “causal ML”) with applications in health economics. The course includes lectures and practical software demonstrations using R to achieve the following learning objectives:
- Understand benefits and limitations of using ML for predictive purposes versus causal inference
- Familiarise with ensembling, cross-validation and cross fitting techniques
- Learn how to use causal ML to estimate average treatment effects (e.g. using double/debiased ML)
- Understand benefits and limitations of causal ML methods (e.g. Causal Forest) to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects
- Explore methods to learn about effect heterogeneity and optimal treatment allocation rules (e.g. policy learning)
- Discover possibilities for integrating causal ML with decision modelling and economic evaluation/HTA
The practical sessions require R and the related software packages available on CRAN. R is an open source statistical software and it will be used to analyse data available in the public domain. Participants are strongly encouraged to install R on their laptop before the course, as support with installation will not be provided during the course. Please refer to the pre-course instructions document for more details about the software installation.
Course instructors:
Dr Julia Hatamyar, Research Fellow, University of York
Supporting course tutors:
Dr Yingying Zhang, Research Fellow, University of York
Dr David Glynn, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Galway
HESG general information
Health Economists’ Study Group
The Health Economists’ Study Group (HESG) exists to support and promote the work of health economists. It was founded in 1972 and is the oldest, and remains one of the largest, organisations of its type in health economics. It is based in the UK, but this does not restrict its membership and interests. The group organises two HESG meetings per year, held at different locations, at which academic and policy-relevant papers are discussed. This meeting is the HESG Winter 2026 Meeting.
Meeting Format
The meeting is intended for health economists rather than more generally for people interested in health economics. Although the group has an academic function – the creation and transmission of knowledge and ideas – its members work in commercial, academic and government settings and its concerns are applied and policy orientated as well as theoretical.
The HESG meetings have a distinctive style and feel, attempting to maintain a study group atmosphere despite large numbers. All papers are pre-circulated and discussed in hour-long sessions using discussants rather than author presentations. The range of papers reflects the current balance of work, the largest categories being economic evaluation, health outcome measurement and the finance and organisation of healthcare. However, every meeting has papers on other recognisably traditional economics subjects such as consumer demand, industry behaviour (particularly hospitals and pharmaceutical companies) and behaviour of the labour market. HESG welcomes people from a variety of backgrounds at its meetings, but they are intended for economists and its ‘working language’ is economics.
Data share notice
The event is run with HESG (the national organisers). HESG will have access to delegates names and email addresses.