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In this paper we study the problems of estimating heterogeneity in causal effects in experimental or observational studies and conducting inference about the magnitude of the differences in treatment effects across subsets of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-08 Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

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

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

Practitioners making decisions based on causal effects typically ignore structural uncertainty. We analyze when this uncertainty is consequential enough to warrant methodological solutions (Bayesian model averaging over competing causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Maurits Kaptein

Inferring a cause from its effect using observed time series data is a major challenge in natural and social sciences. Assuming the effect is generated by the cause trough a linear system, we propose a new approach based on the hypothesis…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-05 Naji Shajarisales , Dominik Janzing , Bernhard Shoelkopf , Michel Besserve

The problem of inferring the direct causal parents of a response variable among a large set of explanatory variables is of high practical importance in many disciplines. Recent work exploits stability of regression coefficients or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-07 Anant Raj , Luigi Gresele , Michel Besserve , Bernhard Schölkopf , Stefan Bauer

Prior work has shown that causal structure can be uniquely identified from observational data when these follow a structural equation model whose error terms have equal variances. We show that this fact is implied by an ordering among…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-25 Wenyu Chen , Mathias Drton , Y. Samuel Wang

Causal inference using observational data is challenging, especially in the bivariate case. Through the minimum description length principle, we link the postulate of independence between the generating mechanisms of the cause and of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-17 Natasa Tagasovska , Valérie Chavez-Demoulin , Thibault Vatter

We describe a method for inferring linear causal relations among multi-dimensional variables. The idea is to use an asymmetry between the distributions of cause and effect that occurs if both the covariance matrix of the cause and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2009-09-25 Dominik Janzing , Patrik O. Hoyer , Bernhard Schoelkopf

We introduce a new formulation of structural causal models for extremes, called the extremal structural causal model (eSCM). Unlike conventional structural causal models, where randomness is governed by a probability distribution, eSCMs use…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Shuyang Bai , Fei Fang , Tiandong Wang

We develop a criterion to certify whether causal effects are identifiable in linear structural equation models with latent variables. Linear structural equation models correspond to directed graphs whose nodes represent the random variables…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-25 Nils Sturma , Mathias Drton

This paper introduces a novel decomposition framework to explain heterogeneity in causal effects observed across different studies, considering both observational and randomized settings. We present a formal decomposition of between-study…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-18 Brian Gilbert , Ivan Dıaz , Kara E. Rudolph , Nicholas Williams , Tat-Thang Vo

Inferring causal directions on discrete and categorical data is an important yet challenging problem. Even though the additive noise models (ANMs) approach can be adapted to the discrete data, the functional structure assumptions make it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-02 Austin Goddard , Yu Xiang

We describe a formal approach to identify 'root causes' of outliers observed in $n$ variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ in a scenario where the causal relation between the variables is a known directed acyclic graph (DAG). To this end, we first…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-06 Dominik Janzing , Kailash Budhathoki , Lenon Minorics , Patrick Blöbaum

This paper develops a framework for identification, estimation, and inference on the causal mechanisms driving endogenous social network formation. Identification is challenging because of unobserved confounders and reverse causality;…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-21 Maximilian Kasy , Elizabeth Linos , Sanaz Mobasseri

Distinguishing cause from effect using observations of a pair of random variables is a core problem in causal discovery. Most approaches proposed for this task, namely additive noise models (ANM), are only adequate for quantitative data. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Mário A. T. Figueiredo , Catarina A. Oliveira

We consider the problem of causal discovery (a.k.a., causal structure learning) in a multi-domain setting. We assume that the causal functions are invariant across the domains, while the distribution of the exogenous noise may vary. Under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Kasra Jalaldoust , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash

In this paper, we deal with the problem of inferring causal directions when the data is on discrete domain. By considering the distribution of the cause $P(X)$ and the conditional distribution mapping cause to effect $P(Y|X)$ as independent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-08 Furui Liu , Laiwan Chan

Causal analyses of longitudinal data generally assume that the qualitative causal structure relating variables remains invariant over time. In structured systems that transition between qualitatively different states in discrete time steps,…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-11 Ranjani Srinivasan , Jaron Lee , Rohit Bhattacharya , Narges Ahmidi , Ilya Shpitser

Structural causal models postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables. The causal structure underlying each such model is naturally represented by a directed graph whose edges indicate for each variable which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-15 David Strieder , Tobias Freidling , Stefan Haffner , Mathias Drton