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Causal discovery in the presence of unobserved common causes from observational data only is a crucial but challenging problem. We categorize all possible causal relationships between two random variables into the following four categories…
Representation learning assumes that real-world data is generated by a few semantically meaningful generative factors (i.e., sources of variation) and aims to discover them in the latent space. These factors are expected to be causally…
We consider linear structural equation models with explicitly modelled latent variables. In such models, observed and latent variables solve linear equations including stochastic noise terms. The goal of our work is to identify the direct…
The common cause principle for two random variables $A$ and $B$ is examined in the case of causal insufficiency, when their common cause $C$ is known to exist, but only the joint probability of $A$ and $B$ is observed. As a result, $C$…
Learning the structure of Bayesian networks and causal relationships from observations is a common goal in several areas of science and technology. We show that the prequential minimum description length principle (MDL) can be used to…
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…
Hidden confounding remains a central challenge in estimating treatment effects from observational data, as unobserved variables can lead to biased causal estimates. While recent work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for…
Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…
We study a model where one target variable Y is correlated with a vector X:=(X_1,...,X_d) of predictor variables being potential causes of Y. We describe a method that infers to what extent the statistical dependences between X and Y are…
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…
Rationalization is a self-explaining framework for NLP models. Conventional work typically uses the maximum mutual information (MMI) criterion to find the rationale that is most indicative of the target label. However, this criterion can be…
This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…
We consider the problem of inferring the directed, causal graph from observational data, assuming no hidden confounders. We take an information theoretic approach, and make three main contributions. First, we show how through algorithmic…
Graph-based causal discovery methods aim to capture conditional independencies consistent with the observed data and differentiate causal relationships from indirect or induced ones. Successful construction of graphical models of data…
The estimation of linear causal models (also known as structural equation models) from data is a well-known problem which has received much attention in the past. Most previous work has, however, made an explicit or implicit assumption of…
Latent confounders---unobserved variables that influence both treatment and outcome---can bias estimates of causal effects. In some cases, these confounders are shared across observations, e.g. all students taking a course are influenced by…
We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…
Given a response $Y$ and a vector $X = (X^1, \dots, X^d)$ of $d$ predictors, we investigate the problem of inferring direct causes of $Y$ among the vector $X$. Models for $Y$ that use all of its causal covariates as predictors enjoy the…
Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both…
A common concern when trying to draw causal inferences from observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding. In practice, many of the covariates may only be proxies of the…