Lucas Kook

I am an 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. Together 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

Apr 2024	New paper 🎉 “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 2024	New preprint 🎉 “Algorithm-agnostic significance testing in supervised learning with multimodal data” in collaboration with Anton Rask Lundborg. The corresponding `comets` R package is available on GitHub and CRAN.
Sep 2023	New preprint 🎉 “Model-based causal feature selection for general response types” in collaboration with Sorawit Saengkyongam, Anton Rask Lundborg, Torsten Hothorn and Jonas Peters. Software implementing our method is available as an R package (`tramicp` on GitHub and on CRAN).
Feb 2023	I successfully defended my PhD thesis titled “Deep Learning and Causal Inference with Transformation Models”.
Jan 2024	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.