"This book offers a statistician's perspective on causal inference. It provides an invaluable review of statistical paradoxes in causal inference from observational data, linking those paradoxes to Pearl's directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). The overview of the literature on matching is the best that I've seen, and the inclusion of R code is a huge plus. The book would make a great introduction (and more) to advanced undergraduate and masters programs in statistics."
-Professor Bryan Dowd, University of Minneapolis, U.S.A.
"A First Course in Causal Inference by Peng Ding is written by an authority in the field at technical level that makes it stand out from existing textbooks on causal inference. It will be a welcome
resource for students and researchers in public health, medicine, and the social sciences who have a good background in math and statistics. Exercises lead readers through important results, appendices review key mathematical and statistical concepts, and the book contains well-written R code that will be extremely useful for translating theory into practice."
-Professor Eben Kenah, The Ohio State University, U.S.A.
"Professor Ding accomplished something impressive with this book - a clear, precise, and thorough introduction to Causal Inference. This book is a must-have for anyone interested in understanding the subject. I highly recommend it."
-Professor Hugo Jales, Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, USA.
"Overall I am pleased to see "A First Course in Causal Inference" by Peng Ding in press. Ding should be commended on a wonderfully useful textbook. I would heartily recommend it to instructors teaching a causal inference course in a statistics department, and am excited to continue to put it to use myself."
-Nicole E. Pashley in
Observational Studies, June 2025
