Related papers: On a Class of Bias-Amplifying Variables that Endan…

To estimate causal effects from observational data, an applied researcher must impose beliefs. The instrumental variables exclusion restriction, for example, represents the belief that the instrument has no direct effect on the outcome of…

Causal models with unobserved variables impose nontrivial constraints on the distributions over the observed variables. When a common cause of two variables is unobserved, it is impossible to uncover the causal relation between them without…

Instrumental variable regression is a common approach for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, identifying valid instruments is often difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on…

Analysts often make visual causal inferences about possible data-generating models. However, visual analytics (VA) software tends to leave these models implicit in the mind of the analyst, which casts doubt on the statistical validity of…

Causal interventions in language model representations have largely targeted discrete features, like grammatical number. However, language models must also make use of features that are graded. We introduce a method for causal intervention…

We consider missingness in the context of causal inference when the outcome of interest may be missing. If the outcome directly affects its own missingness status, i.e., it is "self-censoring", this may lead to severely biased causal effect…

We offer straightforward theoretical results that justify incorporating machine learning in the standard linear instrumental variable setting. The key idea is to use machine learning, combined with sample-splitting, to predict the treatment…

Adjusting for covariates is a well established method to estimate the total causal effect of an exposure variable on an outcome of interest. Depending on the causal structure of the mechanism under study there may be different adjustment…

We address the problem of causal effect estimation in the presence of hidden confounders using nonparametric instrumental variable (IV) regression. An established approach is to use estimators based on learned spectral features, that is,…

Instrumental variables are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. The discrete instrumental variable model has testable implications on the law of the observed data. However, current assessments…

Applied work often studies the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") using linear models with additive effects. I study the interpretation of the OLS estimands in such models when treatment effects are heterogeneous. I show that the…

As an important problem in causal inference, we discuss the estimation of treatment effects (TEs). Representing the confounder as a latent variable, we propose Intact-VAE, a new variant of variational autoencoder (VAE), motivated by the…

We extend the definition of the marginal causal effect to the continuous treatment setting and develop a novel characterization of causal bias in the framework of structural causal models. We prove that our derived bias expression is zero…

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to infer treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we study nonparametric inference with an IV under a separable binary treatment choice model, which…

"M-Bias," as it is called in the epidemiologic literature, is the bias introduced by conditioning on a pretreatment covariate due to a particular "M-Structure" between two latent factors, an observed treatment, an outcome, and a "collider."…

Exogenous heterogeneity, for example, in the form of instrumental variables can help us learn a system's underlying causal structure and predict the outcome of unseen intervention experiments. In this paper, we consider linear models in…

A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature…

In causal inference, principal stratification is a framework for dealing with a posttreatment intermediate variable between a treatment and an outcome, in which the principal strata are defined by the joint potential values of the…

In pharmacoepidemiology research, instrumental variables (IVs) are variables that strongly predict treatment but have no causal effect on the outcome of interest except through the treatment. There remain concerns about the inclusion of IVs…

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe…