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We address the problem of inferring the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome across space, using observational data. The data is possibly subject to unmeasured confounding variables which, in a standard approach, must be adjusted for…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-04 Muhammad Osama , Dave Zachariah , Thomas B. Schön

Many empirical studies estimate causal effects in environments where economic units interact through spatial or network connections. In such settings, outcomes are jointly determined, and treatment induced shocks propagate across…

General Economics · Economics 2026-01-05 Mariluz Mate

Unobserved confounding is one of the greatest challenges for causal discovery. The case in which unobserved variables have a widespread effect on many of the observed ones is particularly difficult because most pairs of variables are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

Making causal inferences from observational studies can be challenging when confounders are missing not at random. In such cases, identifying causal effects is often not guaranteed. Motivated by a real example, we consider a…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-31 Jian Sun , Bo Fu

A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-07 Rickard K. A. Karlsson , Jesse H. Krijthe

This paper introduces a new framework for recovering causal graphs from observational data, leveraging the observation that the distribution of an effect, conditioned on its causes, remains invariant to changes in the prior distribution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Nang Hung Nguyen , Phi Le Nguyen , Thao Nguyen Truong , Trong Nghia Hoang , Masashi Sugiyama

This article studies the estimation of the causal effect of a time-varying treatment on time-to-an-event or on some other continuously distributed outcome. The paper applies to the situation where treatment is repeatedly adapted to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-06-19 Judith J. Lok

Identification of treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is a persistent problem in the social, biological, and medical sciences. The problem of unmeasured confounding in settings with multiple treatments is most common…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-12 Wang Miao , Wenjie Hu , Elizabeth L. Ogburn , Xiaohua Zhou

Causal inference is to estimate the causal effect in a causal relationship when intervention is applied. Precisely, in a causal model with binary interventions, i.e., control and treatment, the causal effect is simply the difference between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Zhenyu Lu , Yurong Cheng , Mingjun Zhong , George Stoian , Ye Yuan , Guoren Wang

Analysts often make visual causal inferences about possible data-generating models. However, visual analytics (VA) software tends to leave these models implicit in the mind of the analyst, which casts doubt on the statistical validity of…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Alex Kale , Yifan Wu , Jessica Hullman

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

Standard methods in preference learning involve estimating the parameters of discrete choice models from data of selections (choices) made by individuals from a discrete set of alternatives (the choice set). While there are many models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-18 Kiran Tomlinson , Johan Ugander , Austin R. Benson

Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

We study the identification of causal effects, motivated by two improvements to identifiability which can be attained if one knows that some variables in a causal graph are functionally determined by their parents (without needing to know…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Yizuo Chen , Adnan Darwiche

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

In real-world studies, the collected confounders may suffer from measurement error. Although mismeasurement of confounders is typically unintentional -- originating from sources such as human oversight or imprecise machinery -- deliberate…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-20 Jeffrey Zhang , Junu Lee

In social sciences and economics, causal inference traditionally focuses on assessing the impact of predefined treatments (or interventions) on predefined outcomes, such as the effect of education programs on earnings. Causal discovery, in…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-12 Martin Huber

Whereas confidence intervals are used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured individuals, confounding intervals can be used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured attributes. Previously, we have introduced a methodology for computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-13 Brian Knaeble , R Mitchell Hughes

Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-30 M. Usaid Awan , Yameng Liu , Marco Morucci , Sudeepa Roy , Cynthia Rudin , Alexander Volfovsky

Learning causal relationships between pairs of complex traits from observational studies is of great interest across various scientific domains. However, most existing methods assume the absence of unmeasured confounding and restrict causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-17 Wei Li , Rui Duan , Sai Li