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Clinical machine learning applications are often plagued with confounders that are clinically irrelevant, but can still artificially boost the predictive performance of the algorithms. Confounding is especially problematic in mobile health…

Applications · Statistics 2018-11-29 Elias Chaibub Neto

Identifying effects of actions (treatments) on outcome variables from observational data and causal assumptions is a fundamental problem in causal inference. This identification is made difficult by the presence of confounders which can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-03-19 Ilya Shpitser , Tyler VanderWeele , James M. Robins

Estimating the health effects of multiple air pollutants is a crucial problem in public health, but one that is difficult due to unmeasured confounding bias. Motivated by this issue, we develop a framework for partial identification of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-23 Suyeon Kang , Alexander Franks , Michelle Audirac , Danielle Braun , Joseph Antonelli

An observational study may be biased for estimating causal effects by failing to control for unmeasured confounders. This paper proposes a new quantity called the "sensitivity value", which is defined as the minimum strength of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-24 Qingyuan Zhao

The assumption of no unmeasured confounders is a critical but unverifiable assumption required for causal inference yet quantitative sensitivity analyses to assess robustness of real-world evidence remains underutilized. The lack of use is…

We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-07 Jose M. Peña

Clinical trials traditionally employ blinding as a design mechanism to reduce the influence of placebo effects. In practice, however, it can be difficult or impossible to blind study participants and unblinded trials are common in medical…

Applications · Statistics 2016-06-22 Elias Chaibub Neto

When studying the causal effect of $x$ on $y$, researchers may conduct regression and report a confidence interval for the slope coefficient $\beta_{x}$. This common confidence interval provides an assessment of uncertainty from sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-08-26 Brian Knaeble , Braxton Osting , Mark Abramson

In empirical studies with time-to-event outcomes, investigators often leverage observational data to conduct causal inference on the effect of exposure when randomized controlled trial data is unavailable. Model misspecification and lack of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-05 Shenbo Xu , Bang Zheng , Bowen Su , Stan Finkelstein , Roy Welsch , Kenney Ng , Ioanna Tzoulaki , Zach Shahn

Mediation analysis assesses the extent to which the exposure affects the outcome indirectly through a mediator and the extent to which it operates directly through other pathways. The popular Baron-Kenny approach estimates the indirect and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-08 Mingrui Zhang , Peng Ding

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-06 Cheng Zheng , Ran Dai , Parameswaran Hari , Mei-Jie Zhang

This paper introduces tools for assessing the sensitivity, to unobserved confounding, of a common estimator of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome that employs weights: the weighted linear regression of the outcome on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Leonard Wainstein , Chad Hazlett

Whereas confidence intervals are used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured individuals, confounding intervals can be used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured attributes. Previously, we have introduced a methodology for computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-13 Brian Knaeble , R Mitchell Hughes

Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-30 Shunichiro Orihara , Shinpei Imori , Kosuke Morikawa , Atsushi Goto , Masataka Taguri

We consider the the problem of identifying causal effects given a high-dimensional treatment vector in the presence of low-dimensional latent confounders. We assume a parametric structural causal model in which the outcome is permitted to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-11 Yuhao Wang , Rajen Shah

Unmeasured confounding is a major challenge for identifying causal relationships from non-experimental data. Here, we propose a method that can accommodate unmeasured discrete confounding. Extending recent identifiability results in deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Patrick Burauel , Frederick Eberhardt , Michel Besserve

We provide an approach to exploratory data analysis in matched observational studies with a single intervention and multiple endpoints. In such settings, the researcher would like to explore evidence for actual treatment effects among these…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-10 Mengqi Lin , Colin Fogarty

Sensitivity to unmeasured confounding is not typically a primary consideration in designing treated-control comparisons in observational studies. We introduce a framework allowing researchers to optimize robustness to omitted variable bias…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-19 Melody Huang , Dan Soriano , Samuel D. Pimentel

Understanding the effects of interventions is central to scientific progress, with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarded as the gold standard for causal inference in many applied fields. However, RCTs are costly, time-consuming, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-27 Drago Plecko , Patrik Okanovic , Torsten Hoefler , Elias Bareinboim

We introduce several methods for assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding in marginal structural models; importantly we allow treatments to be discrete or continuous, static or time-varying. We consider three sensitivity models: a…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-12 Matteo Bonvini , Edward Kennedy , Valerie Ventura , Larry Wasserman