🎥 Methodological Challenges in Inclusive Research Workshop 2: Equitable Statistical Data Analysis 🎥

2 days ago

2 min read

Methodological Challenges in Inclusive Research: Ethical, Practical, and Statistical Trade-offs is a series of two free, half-day online workshops run in partnership between Cancer Research UK and the Data Science for Health Equity community.

We are excited to share the recording of the second workshop in the series, held on 2 November 2026:

About the workshop: Making research inclusive doesn’t end once the data are collected. The structural barriers that lead to underrepresentation in healthcare and research also shape the data we end up with: who is missing, whose measurements are less reliable, and whose experiences the available variables capture poorly. Standard statistical assumptions often don’t hold under these conditions, and analyses that treat a population as uniform can hide real differences between groups. This workshop built on themes from Workshop 1 and covered:

Data quality: how to account for differences in missingness and measurement error across groups, and where methods such as imputation help, along with their limitations
Model design: how to specify a model that targets the question of interest, including careful handling of confounders and explicit modelling of heterogeneity, for example letting a treatment effect vary by demographic group
Generalisability and fairness: how to evaluate differences in model performance across groups using uncertainty quantification, validation, and group-level audits, and how to handle the tensions between data constraints, cost-benefit trade-offs, and whether findings transfer

Panellists:

Panel 1: Data quality. Anne Croudass (Cancer Research UK), James Carpenter (UCL / LSHTM) and Nazrul Islam (University of Southampton)
Panel 2: Model design. Richard Emsley (King’s College London), Alex John London (Carnegie Mellon University) and Montserrat Garcia-Closas (Institute of Cancer Research)
Panel 3: Generalisability and fairness. Nilanjan Chatterjee (Johns Hopkins University), Daniel Westreich (University of North Carolina) and Mai Stafford (Brent Public Health)

Chairs: Vicky Hellon, Seb Doherty-Boyd and Graham Cadwallader (Cancer Research UK)

Public contributor: Samina Begum

Watch the recording of Workshop 1: Inclusive Study Design here