Related papers: The Do-Calculus Revisited
A fundamental challenge in the empirical sciences involves uncovering causal structure through observation and experimentation. Causal discovery entails linking the conditional independence (CI) invariances in observational data to their…
Causal Models are increasingly suggested as a means to reason about the behavior of cyber-physical systems in socio-technical contexts. They allow us to analyze courses of events and reason about possible alternatives. Until now, however,…
The goal of causal mediation analysis, often described within the potential outcomes framework, is to decompose the effect of an exposure on an outcome of interest along different causal pathways. Using the assumption of sequential…
Recent work has made important contributions in the development of causally-interpretable meta-analysis. These methods transport treatment effects estimated in a collection of randomized trials to a target population of interest. Ideally,…
This dissertation addresses achieving causal interpretability in Deep Learning for Software Engineering (DL4SE). While Neural Code Models (NCMs) show strong performance in automating software tasks, their lack of transparency in causal…
Latent confounders---unobserved variables that influence both treatment and outcome---can bias estimates of causal effects. In some cases, these confounders are shared across observations, e.g. all students taking a course are influenced by…
In scientific domains -- from biology to the social sciences -- many questions boil down to \textit{What effect will we observe if we intervene on a particular variable?} If the causal relationships (e.g.~a causal graph) are known, it is…
Causal effect estimation from observational data is one of the essential problems in causal inference. However, most estimation methods rely on the strong assumption that all confounders are observed, which is impractical and untestable in…
This paper introduces a novel Proxy-Enhanced Correlated Random Effects Double Machine Learning (P-CRE-DML) framework to estimate causal effects in panel data with non-linearities and unobserved heterogeneity. Combining Double Machine…
The discussion on causality in human history dates back to ancient Greece, yet to this day, there is still no consensus. Fundamentally, this stems from the nature of human cognition, as understanding causality requires abstract tools to…
Causal models communicate our assumptions about causes and effects in real-world phe- nomena. Often the interest lies in the identification of the effect of an action which means deriving an expression from the observed probability…
Conducting experiments to estimate total effects can be challenging due to cost, ethical concerns, or practical limitations. As an alternative, researchers often rely on causal graphs to determine whether these effects can be identified…
Causal discovery problems use a set of observations to deduce causality between variables in the real world, typically to answer questions about biological or physical systems. These observations are often recorded at regular time…
In many observational studies, researchers are often interested in studying the effects of multiple exposures on a single outcome. Standard approaches for high-dimensional data such as the lasso assume the associations between the exposures…
From simulating galaxy formation to viral transmission in a pandemic, scientific models play a pivotal role in developing scientific theories and supporting government policy decisions that affect us all. Given these critical applications,…
Causal inference has numerous real-world applications in many domains, such as health care, marketing, political science, and online advertising. Treatment effect estimation, a fundamental problem in causal inference, has been extensively…
Causal discovery can be a powerful tool for investigating causality when a system can be observed but is inaccessible to experiments in practice. Despite this, it is rarely used in any scientific or medical fields. One of the major hurdles…
A new and rapidly growing econometric literature is making advances in the problem of using machine learning methods for causal inference questions. Yet, the empirical economics literature has not started to fully exploit the strengths of…
Computational analysis of time-course data with an underlying causal structure is needed in a variety of domains, including neural spike trains, stock price movements, and gene expression levels. However, it can be challenging to determine…
Organizations increasingly rely on predictive models to decide who should be targeted for interventions, such as marketing campaigns, customer retention offers, or medical treatments. Yet these models are usually built to predict outcomes…