Related papers: On a Class of Bias-Amplifying Variables that Endan…
Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed…
Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…
Certain causal models involving unmeasured variables induce no independence constraints among the observed variables but imply, nevertheless, inequality contraints on the observed distribution. This paper derives a general formula for such…
Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…
Recent theoretical work in causal inference has explored an important class of variables which, when conditioned on, may further amplify existing unmeasured confounding bias (bias amplification). Despite this theoretical work, existing…
Instrumental variables are a popular study design for the estimation of treatment effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. In the canonical instrumental variables design, the instrument is a binary variable. In many settings,…
Instrumental variables (IV) estimation suffers selection bias when the analysis conditions on the treatment. Judea Pearl's early graphical definition of instrumental variables explicitly prohibited conditioning on the treatment.…
Instrumental variable (IV) methods are used to estimate causal effects in settings with unobserved confounding, where we cannot directly experiment on the treatment variable. Instruments are variables which only affect the outcome…
Unlike other techniques of causality inference, the use of valid instrumental variables can deal with unobserved sources of both variable errors, variable omissions, and sampling bias, and still arrive at consistent estimates of average…
Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Under the standard IV model, however, the average treatment effect (ATE) is only partially identifiable. To address this,…
Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…
Instrumental variable methods are widely used for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Existing instrumental variable methods for nonlinear outcome models require stringent identifiability conditions. This…
Adjusting for latent covariates is crucial for estimating causal effects from observational textual data. Most existing methods only account for confounding covariates that affect both treatment and outcome, potentially leading to biased…
Instrumental variables have proven useful, in particular within the social sciences and economics, for making inference about the causal effect of a random variable, B, on another random variable, C, in the presence of unobserved…
In this paper, we discuss causal inference on the efficacy of a treatment or medication on a time-to-event outcome with competing risks. Although the treatment group can be randomized, there can be confoundings between the compliance and…
Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…
We address the issue of the testability of instrumental variables derived from observational data. Most existing testable implications are centered on scenarios where the treatment is a discrete variable, e.g., instrumental inequality…
Time-to-event analyses are often plagued by both -- possibly unmeasured -- confounding and competing risks. To deal with the former, the use of instrumental variables for effect estimation is rapidly gaining ground. We show how to make use…
When an exposure of interest is confounded by unmeasured factors, an instrumental variable (IV) can be used to identify and estimate certain causal contrasts. Identification of the marginal average treatment effect (ATE) from IVs relies on…
Researchers often use instrumental variables (IV) models to investigate the causal relationship between an endogenous variable and an outcome while controlling for covariates. When an exogenous variable is unavailable to serve as the…