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Related papers: Sensitivity Analysis Without Assumptions

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Many trials are designed to collect outcomes at or around pre-specified times after randomization. If there is variability in the times when participants are actually assessed, this can pose a challenge to learning the effect of treatment,…

We examine interval estimation of the effect of a treatment T on an outcome Y given the existence of an unobserved confounder U. Using H\"older's inequality, we derive a set of bounds on the confounding bias |E[Y|T=t]-E[Y|do(T=t)]| based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Serge Assaad , Shuxi Zeng , Henry Pfister , Fan Li , Lawrence Carin

Machine learning practice is often impacted by confounders. Confounding can be particularly severe in remote digital health studies where the participants self-select to enter the study. While many different confounding adjustment…

Applications · Statistics 2019-11-14 Elias Chaibub Neto , Meghasyam Tummalacherla , Lara Mangravite , Larsson Omberg

Despite the essential need for comprehensive considerations in responsible AI, factors like robustness, fairness, and causality are often studied in isolation. Adversarial perturbation, used to identify vulnerabilities in models, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Ahmad-Reza Ehyaei , Golnoosh Farnadi , Samira Samadi

We consider the estimation of measures of model performance in a target population when covariate and outcome data are available on a sample from some source population and covariate data, but not outcome data, are available on a simple…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-16 Jon A. Steingrimsson , Sarah E. Robertson , Issa J. Dahabreh

Causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into a portion operating through a hypothesized mediator and a residual direct portion. Identification of natural direct and indirect effects typically rests on the mediator…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Yuki Ohnishi , Fan Li

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

Observational studies are valuable tools for inferring causal effects in the absence of controlled experiments. However, these studies may be biased due to the presence of some relevant, unmeasured set of covariates. One approach to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-17 William Bekerman , Abhinandan Dalal , Carlo del Ninno , Dylan S. Small

Propensity score methods are an important tool to help reduce confounding in non-experimental studies. Most propensity score methods assume that covariates are measured without error. However, covariates are often measured with error, which…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-06-08 Hwanhee Hong , David A. Aaby , Juned Siddique , Elizabeth A. Stuart

Causal conclusions from observational studies may be sensitive to unmeasured confounding. In such cases, a sensitivity analysis is often conducted, which tries to infer the minimum amount of hidden biases or the minimum strength of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Dongxiao Wu , Xinran Li

Nearly all statistical analyses that inform policy-making are based on imperfect data. As examples, the data may suffer from measurement errors, missing values, sample selection bias, or record linkage errors. Analysts have to decide how to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-24 Adway S. Wadekar , Jerome P. Reiter

To ensure reliable causal conclusions from observational (i.e., non-randomized) studies, researchers routinely conduct sensitivity analysis to assess robustness to hidden bias due to unmeasured confounding. In matched observational studies…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-11 Siyu Heng , Elaine K. Chiu , Hyunseung Kang

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

Extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a randomized trial to a target population requires ``generalizability'' or ``transportability'' assumptions, which state that randomized and non-randomized individuals are…

In a clustered observational study, treatment is assigned to groups and all units within the group are exposed to the treatment. Here, we use a clustered observational study (COS) design to estimate the effectiveness of Magnet Nursing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-01 Melody Huang , Eli Ben-Michael , Matthew McHugh , Luke Keele

Weighting estimators based on propensity scores are widely used for causal estimation in a variety of contexts, such as observational studies, marginal structural models and interference. They enjoy appealing theoretical properties such as…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-06 Linbo Wang , Yuexia Zhang , Thomas S. Richardson , Xiao-Hua Zhou

Consider sensitivity analysis for estimating average treatment effects under unmeasured confounding, assumed to satisfy a marginal sensitivity model. At the population level, we provide new representations for the sharp population bounds…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-26 Zhiqiang Tan

A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariate strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-24 Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen , Andrew Ying , Yifan Cui , Xu Shi , Wang Miao

A key challenge in causal inference from observational studies is the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for causal inference that…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-17 Ying Zhou , Dingke Tang , Dehan Kong , Linbo Wang

Unquantified sources of uncertainty in observational causal analyses can break the integrity of the results. One would never want another analyst to repeat a calculation with the same dataset, using a seemingly identical procedure, only to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-12 Marco Morucci , Md. Noor-E-Alam , Cynthia Rudin