Related papers: The Blessings of Multiple Causes

Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…

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…

Unobserved confounding is a major hurdle for causal inference from observational data. Confounders---the variables that affect both the causes and the outcome---induce spurious non-causal correlations between the two. Wang & Blei (2018)…

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Causal effect estimation from observational data is one of the essential problems in causal inference. However, most estimation methods rely on the strong assumption that all confounders are observed, which is impractical and untestable in…

(This comment has been updated to respond to Wang and Blei's rejoinder [arXiv:1910.07320].) The premise of the deconfounder method proposed in "Blessings of Multiple Causes" by Wang and Blei [arXiv:1805.06826], namely that a variable that…

Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…

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…

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

The deconfounder was proposed as a method for estimating causal parameters in a context with multiple causes and unobserved confounding. It is based on recovery of a latent variable from the observed causes. We disentangle the causal…

A major challenge in estimating treatment effects in observational studies is the reliance on untestable conditions such as the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can falsify the assumption…

Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…

Wang and Blei (2019) studies multiple causal inference and proposes the deconfounder algorithm. The paper discusses theoretical requirements and presents empirical studies. Several refinements have been suggested around the theory of the…

Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…

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…

Causal inference in observational studies can be challenging when confounders are subject to missingness. Generally, the identification of causal effects is not guaranteed even under restrictive parametric model assumptions when confounders…

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

This work extends causal inference with stochastic confounders. We propose a new approach to variational estimation for causal inference based on a representer theorem with a random input space. We estimate causal effects involving latent…

Traditional recommender systems aim to estimate a user's rating to an item based on observed ratings from the population. As with all observational studies, hidden confounders, which are factors that affect both item exposures and user…

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,…