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Related papers: Testing Identifiability of Causal Effects

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We propose a method to classify the causal relationship between two discrete variables given only the joint distribution of the variables, acknowledging that the method is subject to an inherent baseline error. We assume that the causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-07 Krzysztof Chalupka , Frederick Eberhardt , Pietro Perona

We consider the problem of estimating a causal effect in a multi-domain setting. The causal effect of interest is confounded by an unobserved confounder and can change between the different domains. We assume that we have access to a proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Manuel Iglesias-Alonso , Felix Schur , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas Peters

We describe a method that infers whether statistical dependences between two observed variables X and Y are due to a "direct" causal link or only due to a connecting causal path that contains an unobserved variable of low complexity, e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Dominik Janzing , Eleni Sgouritsa , Oliver Stegle , Jonas Peters , Bernhard Schoelkopf

Causal effect identification considers whether an interventional probability distribution can be uniquely determined from a passively observed distribution in a given causal structure. If the generating system induces context-specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Santtu Tikka , Antti Hyttinen , Juha Karvanen

Our evolution as a species made a huge step forward when we understood the relationships between causes and effects. These associations may be trivial for some events, but they are not in complex scenarios. To rigorously prove that some…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Martí Pedemonte , Jordi Vitrià , Álvaro Parafita

This study demonstrates the existence of a testable condition for the identification of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data, which relies on two sets of variables: observed covariates to be controlled for…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Feng Xie , Zhengming Chen , Shanshan Luo , Wang Miao , Ruichu Cai , Zhi Geng

Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature, where complete algorithms have been proposed to identify causal queries of interest. The validity of these algorithms hinges on the restrictive assumption of having…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Sina Akbari , Fateme Jamshidi , Ehsan Mokhtarian , Matthew J. Vowels , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We consider the problem of learning causal models from observational data generated by linear non-Gaussian acyclic causal models with latent variables. Without considering the effect of latent variables, one usually infers wrong causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Saber Salehkaleybar , AmirEmad Ghassami , Negar Kiyavash , Kun Zhang

Assessing the magnitude of cause-and-effect relations is one of the central challenges found throughout the empirical sciences. The problem of identification of causal effects is concerned with determining whether a causal effect can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Amin Jaber , Jiji Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

We show that there is a general, informative and reliable procedure for discovering causal relations when, for all the investigator knows, both latent variables and selection bias may be at work. Given information about conditional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Peter L. Spirtes , Christopher Meek , Thomas S. Richardson

Unobserved confounding presents a major threat to causal inference from observational studies. Recently, several authors suggest that this problem may be overcome in a shared confounding setting where multiple treatments are independent…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-25 Dehan Kong , Shu Yang , Linbo Wang

Discovering causal relations is fundamental to reasoning and intelligence. In particular, observational causal discovery algorithms estimate the cause-effect relation between two random entities $X$ and $Y$, given $n$ samples from $P(X,Y)$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-24 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Marco Baroni , David Lopez-Paz

The estimation of causal effects using quasiexperiments often relies on the use of unusual or serendipitous sources of exogenous variation. When the goal is estimating the same causal effects across many different settings, the same unusual…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-26 Nick Huntington-Klein

The long-standing identification problem for causal effects in graphical models has many partial results but lacks a systematic study. We show how computer algebra can be used to either prove that a causal effect can be identified,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-07-23 Luis David García-Puente , Sarah Spielvogel , Seth Sullivant

This paper clarifies a fundamental difference between causal inference and traditional statistical inference by formalizing a mathematical distinction between their respective parameters. We connect two major approaches to causal inference,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-29 Muye Liu , Jun Xie

Causality is important for designing interpretable and robust methods in artificial intelligence research. We propose a local approach to identify whether a variable is a cause of a given target under the framework of causal graphical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-08 Zhuangyan Fang , Yue Liu , Zhi Geng , Shengyu Zhu , Yangbo He

When the causal relationship between X and Y is specified by a structural equation, the causal effect of X on Y is the expected rate of change of Y with respect to changes in X, when all other variables are kept fixed. This causal effect is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-05-13 Wing Hung Wong

Causal disentanglement aims to uncover a representation of data using latent variables that are interrelated through a causal model. Such a representation is identifiable if the latent model that explains the data is unique. In this paper,…

Methods to identify cause-effect relationships currently mostly assume the variables to be scalar random variables. However, in many fields the objects of interest are vectors or groups of scalar variables. We present a new constraint-based…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-02 Jonas Wahl , Urmi Ninad , Jakob Runge