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We present R software packages RobustIV and controlfunctionIV for causal inference with possibly invalid instrumental variables. RobustIV focuses on the linear outcome model. It implements the two-stage hard thresholding method to select…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-21 Taehyeon Koo , Youjin Lee , Dylan S. Small , Zijian Guo

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-24 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

Causal effect estimation from observational data is an important and much studied research topic. The instrumental variable (IV) and local causal discovery (LCD) patterns are canonical examples of settings where a closed-form expression…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-19 Ioan Gabriel Bucur , Tom Claassen , Tom Heskes

Instrumental variables (IV) are a useful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. IV methods are well developed for uncensored outcomes, particularly for structural linear equation models, where simple…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-01 Behzad Kianian , Jung In Kim , Jason P. Fine , Limin Peng

Inferring the effect of interventions within complex systems is a fundamental problem of statistics. A widely studied approach employs structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-14 David Strieder , Mathias Drton

Various methods have recently been proposed to estimate causal effects with confidence intervals that are uniformly valid over a set of data generating processes when high-dimensional nuisance models are estimated by post-model-selection or…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-07 Niloofar Moosavi , Tetiana Gorbach , Xavier de Luna

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Jing Zou , Wei Li , Wei Lin

One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-03 Ricardo Silva , Robin Evans

This paper concerns robust inference on average treatment effects following model selection. In the selection on observables framework, we show how to construct confidence intervals based on a doubly-robust estimator that are robust to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-04-13 Max H. Farrell

What is the difference of a prediction that is made with a causal model and a non-causal model? Suppose we intervene on the predictor variables or change the whole environment. The predictions from a causal model will in general work as…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-27 Jonas Peters , Peter Bühlmann , Nicolai Meinshausen

We address the issue of the testability of instrumental variables derived from observational data. Most existing testable implications are centered on scenarios where the treatment is a discrete variable, e.g., instrumental inequality…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-13 Xichen Guo , Zheng Li , Biwei Huang , Yan Zeng , Zhi Geng , Feng Xie

In social science researches, causal inference regarding peer effects often faces significant challenges due to homophily bias and contextual confounding. For example, unmeasured health conditions (e.g., influenza) and psychological states…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-29 Shanshan Luo , Kang Shuai , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li , Yangbo He

Doubly robust estimators of causal effects are a popular means of estimating causal effects. Such estimators combine an estimate of the conditional mean of the outcome given treatment and confounders (the so-called outcome regression) with…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-17 David Benkeser , Weixin Cai , Mark J van der Laan

The method of instrumental variables provides a fundamental and practical tool for causal inference in many empirical studies where unmeasured confounding between the treatments and the outcome is present. Modern data such as the genetical…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-28 Ziang Niu , Yuwen Gu , Wei Li

Mobile health studies can leverage longitudinal sensor data from smartphones to guide the application of personalized medical interventions. In this paper, we propose that adoption of an instrumental variable approach for randomized trials…

Learning causal relationships between pairs of complex traits from observational studies is of great interest across various scientific domains. However, most existing methods assume the absence of unmeasured confounding and restrict causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-17 Wei Li , Rui Duan , Sai Li

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-11-22 Linbo Wang , James M. Robins , Thomas S. Richardson

Causal inference methods are gaining increasing prominence in pharmaceutical drug development in light of the recently published addendum on estimands and sensitivity analysis in clinical trials to the E9 guideline of the International…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-30 Jack Bowden , Bjoern Bornkamp , Ekkehard Glimm , Frank Bretz