Hi, I'm Sam! Welcome to my page. I research the math behind medical decisions, and I try to use it to help patients and improve the healthcare system. I think about everything from how to apply evidence, randomized and observational, to decisions, to where chatbots fit in, to how statistics interacts with the more human elements of decision-making. Feel free to check out my blog, substack, or publications! I also list some work below.
Medical decision making / decision theory / reinforcement learning
- D-dimer: not bad, just misunderstood
- Imitation, AGI, and medical decision making
- Action-conditioned world models
- A policy perspective on causality
- Safe medical uses for generative LLMs (essay)
- GPT-5 and medical decision making (essay)
- Decision analysis and medical research (essay)
- Language models and medical decision making (blog post), (manuscript), (substack)
- Decision analysis and big pharma (essay)
- Reflections on relative sparsity (essay)
- Decision analysis and malpractice (essay)
- The kindness of decision analysis (essay)
- Decision analysis and the real world (essay)
- The roles assigned by decision analysis (essay)
- How to use probability to describe medical decisions (essay)
- Inference for relative sparsity (preprint)
- Relative sparsity for medical decision problems (paper), (video)
Environmental health / inverse reinforcement learning
- Optimality-based reward learning with applications to toxicology (preprint)
Prediction
Radiation dose monitoring / quality control / outlier detection
- Radiation Exposure Extraction Engine (paper)
Diagnosis
- The information mismatch (preprint)
- ChatGPT and post-test probability (preprint)
- On the post-test probability of covid-19 (app), (forum discussion)
Culture
- Chat, images, and "AI" (essay)
- Bayesian and frequentist statistics (PowerPoint)
- Data science to statistics in an academic medical center (essay)
- Statistics and machine learning (forum)
- Kaggle and chance (forum)
Addiction
Teaching