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We introduce a new instrumental variable (IV) estimator for heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of endogeneity. Our estimator is based on double/debiased machine learning (DML) and uses efficient machine learning instruments…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-06 Cyrill Scheidegger , Zijian Guo , Peter Bühlmann

Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Danielle Tsao , Krikamol Muandet , Frederick Eberhardt , Emilija Perković

A major challenge in instrumental variables (IV) analysis is to find instruments that are valid, or have no direct effect on the outcome and are ignorable. Typically one is unsure whether all of the putative IVs are in fact valid. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-10 Zijian Guo , Hyunseung Kang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

Instrumental variable (IV) methods mitigate bias from unobserved confounding in observational causal inference but rely on the availability of a valid instrument, which can often be difficult or infeasible to identify in practice. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-08 Frances Dean , Jenna Fields , Radhika Bhalerao , Marie Charpignon , Ahmed Alaa

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to infer treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we study nonparametric inference with an IV under a separable binary treatment choice model, which…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Chan Park , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-01 Roy S. Zawadzki , Joshua D. Grill , Daniel L. Gillen

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

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Felix Schur , Niklas Pfister , Peng Ding , Sach Mukherjee , Jonas Peters

The instrumental variable method is widely used in the health and social sciences for identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of potentially unmeasured confounding. In order to improve efficiency, multiple…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-19 Baoluo Sun , Zhonghua Liu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

The ISCHEMIA Trial randomly assigned patients with ischemic heart disease to an invasive treatment strategy centered on revascularization with a control group assigned non-invasive medical therapy. As is common in such ``strategy trials,''…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-01-06 Joshua D. Angrist , Bruno Ferman , Carol Gao , Peter Hull , Otavio L. Tecchio , Robert W. Yeh

Two binary instrumental variables (IVs) are nested if individuals who comply under one binary IV also comply under the other. This situation often arises when the two IVs represent different intensities of encouragement or discouragement to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-28 Zhe Chen , Xinran Li , Michael O. Harhay , Bo Zhang

This paper proposes semi-instrumental variables (semi-IVs) as an alternative to instrumental variables (IVs) to identify the causal effect of a binary (or discrete) endogenous treatment. A semi-IV is a less restrictive form of instrument:…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-23 Christophe Bruneel-Zupanc

Instrumental variable methods are widely used to address unmeasured confounding, yet much of the existing literature has focused on the binary instrument setting. Extensions to continuous instruments often impose strong parametric…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-12 Zhenghao Zeng , Alexander W. Levis , JungHo Lee , Edward H. Kennedy , Luke Keele

Instrumental variables (IVs) provide a powerful strategy for identifying causal effects in the presence of unobservable confounders. Within the nonparametric setting (NPIV), recent methods have been based on nonlinear generalizations of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Yuri Fonseca , Caio Peixoto , Yuri Saporito

There is an increasing interest in estimating heterogeneity in causal effects in randomized and observational studies. However, little research has been conducted to understand heterogeneity in an instrumental variables study. In this work,…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-20 Michael Johnson , Jiongyi Cao , Hyunseung Kang

Standard approaches in generalizability often focus on generalizing the intent-to-treat (ITT). However, in practice, a more policy-relevant quantity is the generalized impact of an intervention across compliers. While instrumental variable…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-03 Zhongren Chen , Melody Huang

Traditional instrumental variable (IV) estimators face a fundamental constraint: they can only accommodate as many endogenous treatment variables as available instruments. This limitation becomes particularly challenging in settings where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shiangyi Lin , Hui Lan , Vasilis Syrgkanis

In modern drug development, the broader availability of high-dimensional observational data provides opportunities for scientist to explore subgroup heterogeneity, especially when randomized clinical trials are unavailable due to cost and…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-24 Xinzhou Guo , Linqing Wei , Chong Wu , Jingshen Wang

Unobserved confounding is the main obstacle to causal effect estimation from observational data. Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for causal effect estimation when there exist latent confounders. With the standard IV method,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Thuc duy Le , Jixue Liu

A growing statistical literature focuses on causal inference in the context of experiments where the target of inference is the average treatment effect in a finite population and random assignment determines which subjects are allocated to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-04 Jonas M. Mikhaeil , Donald P. Green