Flock of VA papers

I’m afraid that Healthy Algorithms will be pretty quiet in the next month, I’ve got some major other writing commitments to attend to, and I need to ration my keystrokes if I’m going to make the deadline.

But here is something I’m happy to leave at the top of the page while I’m busy: the special issue of Population Health Metrics devoted to the Verbal Autopsy is provisionally available.

This includes the paper on using random forests for computer coding verbal autopsies that I’ve mentioned before, a paper describing the massive efforts that went into collecting a verbal autopsy validation dataset, and a paper on our take on the metrics of prediction quality that we recommend for any approach to verbal autopsy.

Bonus, a commentary that quotes Foucault to put random forests in context.