Related papers: Surrogate Outcomes and Transportability
Estimating the long-term effects of treatments is of interest in many fields. A common challenge in estimating such treatment effects is that long-term outcomes are unobserved in the time frame needed to make policy decisions. One approach…
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…
In many experimental and observational studies, the outcome of interest is often difficult or expensive to observe, reducing effective sample sizes for estimating average treatment effects (ATEs) even when identifiable. We study how…
We introduce z-transportability, the problem of estimating the causal effect of a set of variables X on another set of variables Y in a target domain from experiments on any subset of controllable variables Z where Z is an arbitrary subset…
There are many scenarios where short- and long-term causal effects of an intervention are different. For example, low-quality ads may increase short-term ad clicks but decrease the long-term revenue via reduced clicks. This work, therefore,…
We address the problem of estimating the effect of intervening on a set of variables X from experiments on a different set, Z, that is more accessible to manipulation. This problem, which we call z-identifiability, reduces to ordinary…
In many real-world causal inference applications, the primary outcomes (labels) are often partially missing, especially if they are expensive or difficult to collect. If the missingness depends on covariates (i.e., missingness is not…
A surrogate endpoint S in a clinical trial is an outcome that may be measured earlier or more easily than the true outcome of interest T. In this work, we extend causal inference approaches to validate such a surrogate using potential…
Existing work in data fusion has covered identification of causal estimands when integrating data from heterogeneous sources. These results typically require additional assumptions to make valid estimation and inference. However, there is…
The classical notion of causal effect identifiability is defined in terms of treatment and outcome variables. In this paper, we consider the identifiability of state-based causal effects: how an intervention on a particular state of…
Unobserved confounding presents a major threat to causal inference from observational studies. Recently, several authors suggest that this problem may be overcome in a shared confounding setting where multiple treatments are independent…
Inferring causal effects on long-term outcomes using short-term surrogates is crucial to rapid innovation. However, even when treatments are randomized and surrogates fully mediate their effect on outcomes, it's possible that we get the…
A common practice in clinical trials is to evaluate a treatment effect on an intermediate endpoint when the true outcome of interest would be difficult or costly to measure. We consider how to validate intermediate endpoints in a…
When assessing causal effects, determining the target population to which the results are intended to generalize is a critical decision. Randomized and observational studies each have strengths and limitations for estimating causal effects…
Trial engagement effects are effects of trial participation on the outcome that are not mediated by treatment assignment. Most work on extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a randomized trial to a target population…
In studies of discrimination, researchers often seek to estimate a causal effect of race or gender on outcomes. For example, in the criminal justice context, one might ask whether arrested individuals would have been subsequently charged or…
Surrogate markers offer the potential to reduce the burden of data collection by replacing costly or invasive primary outcomes with more accessible measurements, provided that they can faithfully indicate the effectiveness of a treatment.…
Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…
In many empirical settings, directly observing a treatment variable may be infeasible although an error-prone surrogate measurement of the latter will often be available. Causal inference based solely on the surrogate measurement is…
A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…