Lucas Kook

I am assistant professor of statistics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Before, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in statistics and causal inference at the Copenhagen Causality Lab where I collaborated with Niklas Pfister and Jonas Peters. I work at the intersection of distributional regression and causal inference with a focus on biomedical applications.

I did my PhD at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Beate Sick and Torsten Hothorn. My PhD research focused on combining distributional regression models with deep learning approaches and causal inference to improve treatment decisions for acute ischemic stroke patients.

I currently serve as Junior Editor for the Journal of Statistical Software and Associate Editor for Advances in Statistical Analysis.

News

Aug 2024 New publication 🎉 “Algorithm-agnostic significance testing in supervised learning with multimodal data” in collaboration with Anton Rask Lundborg has been accepted for publication in Briefings in Bioinformatics! The corresponding comets R package is available on GitHub and CRAN.
Aug 2024 New publication 🎉 “Model-based causal feature selection for general response types” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Software implementing our method is available in the R package tramicp on GitHub and on CRAN.
Jun 2024 New preprint 🎉 “Instrumental Variable Estimation of Distributional Causal Effects” in collaboration with Niklas Pfister. Code is available on GitHub.
Apr 2024 New publication 🎉 “Estimating Conditional Distributions with Neural Networks using R package deeptrafo” got accepted for publication in the Journal of Statistical Software. Software is available on CRAN.
Mar 2024 I started my new role as assistant professor of statistics at the Institute for Statistics and Mathematics of the Vienna University for Economics and Business.
Feb 2023 I successfully defended my PhD thesis titled “Deep Learning and Causal Inference with Transformation Models”.
Jan 2023 I acquired a postdoctoral mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for my proposal on Distributional Instrumental Variables Estimation (DIVE). During the fellowship, I will be working with Niklas Pfister and Jonas Peters at the University of Copenhagen, starting March 2023.