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Related papers: On Associative Confounder Bias

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Causal inference with observational data can be performed under an assumption of no unobserved confounders (unconfoundedness assumption). There is, however, seldom clear subject-matter or empirical evidence for such an assumption. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-13 Minna Genbäck , Xavier de Luna

We consider inferring the causal effect of a treatment (intervention) on an outcome of interest in situations where there is potentially an unobserved confounder influencing both the treatment and the outcome. This is achievable by assuming…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-15 Ruolin Meng , Ming-Yu Chung , Dhanajit Brahma , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

We present new results on average causal effects in settings with unmeasured exposure-outcome confounding. Our results are motivated by a class of estimands, e.g., frequently of interest in medicine and public health, that are currently not…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-25 Lan Wen , Aaron L. Sarvet , Mats J. Stensrud

We consider missingness in the context of causal inference when the outcome of interest may be missing. If the outcome directly affects its own missingness status, i.e., it is "self-censoring", this may lead to severely biased causal effect…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-12 Jacob M Chen , Daniel Malinsky , Rohit Bhattacharya

Several problems in statistics involve the combination of high-variance unbiased estimators with low-variance estimators that are only unbiased under strong assumptions. A notable example is the estimation of causal effects while combining…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-25 Michael Oberst , Alexander D'Amour , Minmin Chen , Yuyan Wang , David Sontag , Steve Yadlowsky

Suppose that we are interested in the average causal effect of a binary treatment on an outcome when this relationship is confounded by a binary confounder. Suppose that the confounder is unobserved but a non-differential binary proxy of it…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-29 Jose M. Peña

The propensity score is a common tool for estimating the causal effect of a binary treatment in observational data. In this setting, matching, subclassification, imputation, or inverse probability weighting on the propensity score can…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-03 Michael J Lopez , Roee Gutman

Confounding matters in almost all observational studies that focus on causality. In order to eliminate bias caused by connfounders, oftentimes a substantial number of features need to be collected in the analysis. In this case, large p…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-30 Shinyuu Lee , Yuru Zhu

Proximal causal inference is a recently proposed framework for evaluating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For point identification of causal effects, it leverages a pair of so-called treatment and outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Observational studies require adjustment for confounding factors that are correlated with both the treatment and outcome. In the setting where the observed variables are tabular quantities such as average income in a neighborhood, tools…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Connor T. Jerzak , Fredrik Johansson , Adel Daoud

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

Recent theoretical work in causal inference has explored an important class of variables which, when conditioned on, may further amplify existing unmeasured confounding bias (bias amplification). Despite this theoretical work, existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-03-20 Tyrel Stokes , Russell Steele , Ian Shrier

This study demonstrates the existence of a testable condition for the identification of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data, which relies on two sets of variables: observed covariates to be controlled for…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

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

We consider the problem of estimating a causal effect in a multi-domain setting. The causal effect of interest is confounded by an unobserved confounder and can change between the different domains. We assume that we have access to a proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Manuel Iglesias-Alonso , Felix Schur , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas Peters

Assessing the causal effects of interventions on ordinal outcomes is an important objective of many educational and behavioral studies. Under the potential outcomes framework, we can define causal effects as comparisons between the…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-04-06 Jiannan Lu , Peng Ding , Tirthankar Dasgupta

Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

Inferring causal effects of a treatment, intervention or policy from observational data is central to many applications. However, state-of-the-art methods for causal inference seldom consider the possibility that covariates have missing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-26 Imke Mayer , Julie Josse , Félix Raimundo , Jean-Philippe Vert

In causal inference, interference occurs when the treatment of one unit may affect the outcomes of other units. The goal of this work is to serve as a guide to the use of linear outcome modeling for estimating causal effects in settings…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-01 Eric Tong , Salvador V. Balkus

Mediation analysis extending beyond single mediators has gained significant attention in recent years. However, related methods often assume the absence of unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding. To address this, we develop a mediation…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Kang Shuai , Lan Liu , Yangbo He , Wei Li