At least 40% of children will experience a traumatic event. Of those who experience a trauma, 15-40% will develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and other adverse psychiatric, health, and functional outcomes (herein called Child Traumatic Stress - CTS). Despite decades of research on risk factors for CTS, the field has not arrived at specific risk factor models that can accurately predict the likelihood of CTS outcomes or identify factors that ? if changed ? would change their likelihood. Knowledge about changes in factors that result in changes in outcomes is, by definition, causal. The vast majority of findings in the literature on risk for CTS cannot provide such causal knowledge because such findings were based on the application of correlational methods to observational data. Experimental research cannot ? for all practical purposes - be conducted for human research on risk for CTS. Thus, the field is left with correlational observational research as the near exclusive generator of empirical knowledge on risk for CTS, and such knowledge is unsuitable to guide the actions (i.e. interventions) that must be taken to change children's likelihood of acquiring CTS outcomes. We propose to address this considerable barrier to progress by applying methods that can enable confident causal inference with large observational data sets containing a broad diversity of risk variables for CTS. Machine Learning (ML) predictive and causal modeling methods will be applied to discover causal relationships among measured variables from observational data: and from such determined causal relationships, to estimate the effect on a CTS outcome when a causal variable is manipulated (i.e. intervention simulation). We will build models for outcomes associated with childhood trauma in the literature and that entail significant burden to children's well-being, functioning, and development: PTSD, Depression, Substance Abuse, Health, and Educational Performance.
This application proposes research to apply an array of powerful and innovative computational methods ? well validated in other fields ? to advance the capacity to predict and prevent traumatic stress in children and adolescents. These methods will be applied to several highly relevant, existing data sets that cover diverse populations of traumatized youth and with diverse data collection designs. The data sets and the analytic methodologies have been carefully selected to advance knowledge related to prediction, discovery of causal mechanisms, and the identification of promising preventative interventions for child traumatic stress.
