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In the statistical literature, a number of methods have been proposed to ensure valid inference about marginal effects of variables on a longitudinal outcome in settings with irregular monitoring times. However, the potential biases due to…

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

Measuring treatment effects in observational studies is challenging because of confounding bias. Confounding occurs when a variable affects both the treatment and the outcome. Traditional methods such as propensity score matching estimate…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

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…

A growing number of methods aim to assess the challenging question of treatment effect variation in observational studies. This special section of "Observational Studies" reports the results of a workshop conducted at the 2018 Atlantic…

Increasing the success rate of a process, i.e. the percentage of cases that end in a positive outcome, is a recurrent process improvement goal. At runtime, there are often certain actions (a.k.a. treatments) that workers may execute to lift…

It is often of interest in observational studies to measure the causal effect of a treatment on time-to-event outcomes. In a medical setting, observational studies commonly involve patients who initiate medication therapy and others who do…

Causal inference in observational studies is notoriously difficult, due to the fact that the experimenter is not in charge of the treatment assignment mechanism. Many potential con- founding factors (PCFs) exist in such a scenario, and if…

Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for making informed decisions in medicine, yet they often lack generalizability to the patient populations in clinical practice. Observational studies, on the other hand, cover a broader…

Inferring causal effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to treatment. Observational studies in infectious disease research present the additional challenge that one participant's treatment…

Inference about treatment effects for time-to-event outcomes is often obscured by the presence of competing events. A particularly complex situation arises when the treatment influences the occurrence of the competing event. A comprehensive…

Undertaking causal inference with observational data is incredibly useful across a wide range of tasks including the development of medical treatments, advertisements and marketing, and policy making. There are two significant challenges…

Causal inference for observational longitudinal studies often requires the accurate estimation of treatment effects on time-to-event outcomes in the presence of time-dependent patient history and time-dependent covariates. To tackle this…

Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data…

Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…

Many scientific questions in biomedical, environmental, and psychological research involve understanding the effects of multiple factors on outcomes. While factorial experiments are ideal for this purpose, randomized controlled treatment…

A fundamental limitation of causal inference in observational studies is that perceived evidence for an effect might instead be explained by factors not accounted for in the primary analysis. Methods for assessing the sensitivity of a…

Using observational data to estimate the effect of a treatment is a powerful tool for decision-making when randomized experiments are infeasible or costly. However, observational data often yields biased estimates of treatment effects,…

Understanding how the causal effect of a treatment evolves over time, including the potential for waning, is important for informed decisions on treatment discontinuation or repetition. For example, waning vaccine protection influences…