Related papers: Necessary and Probably Sufficient Test for Finding…
Inferring causal relations from experimental observations is of primal importance in science. Instrumental tests provide an essential tool for that aim, as they allow one to estimate causal dependencies even in the presence of unobserved…
External validity is often questionable in empirical research, especially in randomized experiments due to the trade-off between internal validity and external validity. To quantify the robustness of external validity, one must first…
The standard method to check for the independence of two real-valued random variables -- demonstrating that the bivariate joint distribution factors into the product of its marginals -- is both necessary and sufficient. Here we present a…
Missing data occur frequently in empirical studies in health and social sciences, often compromising our ability to make accurate inferences. An outcome is said to be missing not at random (MNAR) if, conditional on the observed variables,…
In many situations, researchers are interested in identifying dynamic effects of an irreversible treatment with a time-invariant binary instrumental variable (IV). For example, in evaluations of dynamic effects of training programs with a…
Causal inference from longitudinal observational data is a challenging problem due to the difficulty in correctly identifying the time-dependent confounders, especially in the presence of latent time-dependent confounders. Instrumental…
This paper proposes three novel test procedures that yield valid inference in an environment with many weak instrumental variables (MWIV). It is observed that the t statistic of the jackknife instrumental variable estimator (JIVE) has an…
The estimation of the causal effect of an endogenous treatment based on an instrumental variable (IV) is often complicated by attrition, sample selection, or non-response in the outcome of interest. To tackle the latter problem, the latent…
Estimating the causal effect of a treatment on the entire response distribution is an important yet challenging task. For instance, one might be interested in how a pension plan affects not only the average savings among all individuals but…
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…
This paper studies the partial identification of treatment effects in Instrumental Variables (IV) settings with binary outcomes under violations of independence. I derive the identified sets for the treatment parameters of interest in the…
We present a comprehensive R software ivmodel for analyzing instrumental variables with one endogenous variable. The package implements a general class of estimators called k- class estimators and two confidence intervals that are fully…
We consider hypothesis testing of binary causal queries using observational data. Since the mapping of causal models to the observational distribution that they induce is not one-to-one, in general, causal queries are often only partially…
Imitation learning from demonstrations usually suffers from the confounding effects of unmeasured variables (i.e., unmeasured confounders) on the states and actions. If ignoring them, a biased estimation of the policy would be entailed. To…
In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…
Conditional-independence-based discovery uses statistical tests to identify a graphical model that represents the independence structure of variables in a dataset. These tests, however, can be unreliable, and algorithms are sensitive to…
In a randomized controlled trial, treatment switching (also called contamination or crossover) occurs when a patient initially assigned to one treatment arm changes to another arm during the course of follow-up. Overlooking treatment…
Background: Instrumental variables (IVs) can be used to provide evidence as to whether a treatment X has a causal effect on an outcome Y. Even if the instrument Z satisfies the three core IV assumptions of relevance, independence and the…
Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…
In an empirical study of persuasion, researchers often use a binary instrument to encourage individuals to consume information and take some action. We show that, with a binary Imbens-Angrist instrumental variable model and the monotone…