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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

Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Christos Louizos , Uri Shalit , Joris Mooij , David Sontag , Richard Zemel , Max Welling

Bidirectional causal relationships arising from mutual interactions between variables are commonly observed within biomedical, econometrical, and social science contexts. When such relationships are further complicated by unobserved…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-27 Yafang Deng , Kang Shuai , Shanshan Luo

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

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…

Causal inference studies using textual social media data can provide actionable insights on human behavior. Making accurate causal inferences with text requires controlling for confounding which could otherwise impart bias. Recently, many…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Galen Weld , Peter West , Maria Glenski , David Arbour , Ryan Rossi , Tim Althoff

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

When studying the causal effect of $x$ on $y$, researchers may conduct regression and report a confidence interval for the slope coefficient $\beta_{x}$. This common confidence interval provides an assessment of uncertainty from sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-08-26 Brian Knaeble , Braxton Osting , Mark Abramson

Classical causal and statistical inference methods typically assume the observed data consists of independent realizations. However, in many applications this assumption is inappropriate due to a network of dependences between units in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Rohit Bhattacharya , Daniel Malinsky , Ilya Shpitser

When estimating causal effects from observational studies, researchers often need to adjust for many covariates to deconfound the non-causal relationship between exposure and outcome, among which many covariates are discrete. The behavior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Zhenghao Zeng , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Yanjun Han , Edward H. Kennedy

We propose a framework for determining whether the causal dependence of an outcome $Y$ on a covariate $X$ changes at a given time point, given confounders $\boldsymbol{Z}$. For instance, in financial markets, the effect of a market…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-08 Shakeel Gavioli-Akilagun , Kieran Wood , Francesco Quinzan

Conventional methods in causal effect inferencetypically rely on specifying a valid set of control variables. When this set is unknown or misspecified, inferences will be erroneous. We propose a method for inferring average causal effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-14 Ludvig Hult , Dave Zachariah

Discovering causal relations is fundamental to reasoning and intelligence. In particular, observational causal discovery algorithms estimate the cause-effect relation between two random entities $X$ and $Y$, given $n$ samples from $P(X,Y)$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-24 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Marco Baroni , David Lopez-Paz

Despite the major advances taken in causal modeling, causality is still an unfamiliar topic for many statisticians. In this paper, it is demonstrated from the beginning to the end how causal effects can be estimated from observational data…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-07-03 Juha Karvanen

Clinical machine learning applications are often plagued with confounders that are clinically irrelevant, but can still artificially boost the predictive performance of the algorithms. Confounding is especially problematic in mobile health…

Applications · Statistics 2018-11-29 Elias Chaibub Neto

We consider a causal effect that is confounded by an unobserved variable, but with observed proxy variables of the confounder. We show that, with at least two independent proxy variables satisfying a certain rank condition, the causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-29 Wang Miao , Zhi Geng , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-10-19 Antti Hyttinen , Frederick Eberhardt , Patrik O. Hoyer

Understanding and quantifying cause and effect is an important problem in many domains. The generally-agreed solution to this problem is to perform a randomised controlled trial. However, even when randomised controlled trials can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-22 Graham Van Goffrier , Lucas Maystre , Ciarán Gilligan-Lee

Spurious association between X and Y may be due to a confounding variable W. Statisticians may adjust for W using a variety of techniques. This paper presents the results of simulations conducted to assess the performance of those…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-11 Brian Knaeble

Discovering the causal effect of a decision is critical to nearly all forms of decision-making. In particular, it is a key quantity in drug development, in crafting government policy, and when implementing a real-world machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-04 Limor Gultchin , Matt J. Kusner , Varun Kanade , Ricardo Silva