Related papers: Generalized Cornfield conditions for the risk diff…

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…

Unmeasured confounding is a key threat to reliable causal inference based on observational studies. Motivated from two powerful natural experiment devices, the instrumental variables and difference-in-differences, we propose a new method…

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…

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…

Random-effects meta-analyses of observational studies can produce biased estimates if the synthesized studies are subject to unmeasured confounding. We propose sensitivity analyses quantifying the extent to which unmeasured confounding of…

Observational data is increasingly used as a means for making individual-level causal predictions and intervention recommendations. The foremost challenge of causal inference from observational data is hidden confounding, whose presence…

Causal inference from observational data often assumes "ignorability," that all confounders are observed. This assumption is standard yet untestable. However, many scientific studies involve multiple causes, different variables whose…

Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…

Several problems in statistics involve the combination of high-variance unbiased estimators with low-variance estimators that are only unbiased under strong assumptions. A notable example is the estimation of causal effects while combining…

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…

Nonignorable missingness and noncompliance can occur even in well-designed randomized experiments making the intervention effect that the experiment was designed to estimate nonidentifiable. Nonparametric causal bounds provide a way to…

When assessing the presence of an exposure causal effect on a given outcome, it is well known that classical measurement error of the exposure can reduce the power of a test of the null hypothesis in question, although its type I error rate…

Observational studies are the primary source of data for causal inference, but it is challenging when existing unmeasured confounding. Missing data problems are also common in observational studies. How to obtain the causal effects from the…

In real-world studies, the collected confounders may suffer from measurement error. Although mismeasurement of confounders is typically unintentional -- originating from sources such as human oversight or imprecise machinery -- deliberate…

The possibility of unmeasured confounding is one of the main limitations for causal inference from observational studies. There are different methods for (partially) empirically assessing the plausibility of unconfoundedness. However, most…

Many causal models of interest in epidemiology involve longitudinal exposures, confounders and mediators. However, repeated measurements are not always available or used in practice, leading analysts to overlook the time-varying nature of…

No unmeasured confounding is often assumed in estimating treatment effects in observational data when using approaches such as propensity scores and inverse probability weighting. However, in many such studies due to the limitation of the…

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…

Here, we explain and illustrate a geometric perspective on causal inference in cohort studies that can help epidemiologists understand the role of standardization in causal inference as well as the distinctions between confounding, effect…