English
Related papers

Related papers: On Multi-Cause Causal Inference with Unobserved Co…

200 papers

Fairness for machine learning predictions is widely required in practice for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. Existing work typically focuses on settings without unobserved confounding, even though unobserved confounding can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Maresa Schröder , Dennis Frauen , Stefan Feuerriegel

We consider the problem of estimating a causal effect in a multi-domain setting. The causal effect of interest is confounded by an unobserved confounder and can change between the different domains. We assume that we have access to a proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Manuel Iglesias-Alonso , Felix Schur , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas Peters

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-24 Maximilian Ilse , Patrick Forré , Max Welling , Joris M. Mooij

It is important to draw causal inference from observational studies, which, however, becomes challenging if the confounders have missing values. Generally, causal effects are not identifiable if the confounders are missing not at random. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-04 Shu Yang , Linbo Wang , Peng Ding

Causal inference plays a vital role in diverse domains like epidemiology, healthcare, and economics. De-confounding and counterfactual prediction in observational data has emerged as a prominent concern in causal inference research. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Yonghe Zhao , Qiang Huang , Siwei Wu , Yun Peng , Huiyan Sun

Causal models with unobserved variables impose nontrivial constraints on the distributions over the observed variables. When a common cause of two variables is unobserved, it is impossible to uncover the causal relation between them without…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-14 Beata Zjawin , Elie Wolfe , Robert W. Spekkens

We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-07 Jose M. Peña

Causal inference is difficult in the presence of unobserved confounders. We introduce the instrumented common confounding (ICC) approach to (nonparametrically) identify causal effects with instruments, which are exogenous only conditional…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-09-20 Christian Tien

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are becoming increasingly popular as they seem to offer the only viable way to overcome the problem of unobserved confounding in observational studies. However, some attention has to be paid to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-03 Vanessa Didelez , Sha Meng , Nuala A. Sheehan

We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-06 Dimitris Bertsimas , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

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…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Ruocheng Guo , Jundong Li , Huan Liu

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

In the era of fast-paced precision medicine, observational studies play a major role in properly evaluating new treatments in clinical practice. Yet, unobserved confounding can significantly compromise causal conclusions drawn from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-20 Piersilvio De Bartolomeis , Javier Abad , Konstantin Donhauser , Fanny Yang

Recovering causal structure in the presence of latent variables is an important but challenging task. While many methods have been proposed to handle it, most of them require strict and/or untestable assumptions on the causal structure. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Wei Chen , Linjun Peng , Zhiyi Huang , Haoyue Dai , Zhifeng Hao , Ruichu Cai , Kun Zhang

Confounding matters in almost all observational studies that focus on causality. In order to eliminate bias caused by connfounders, oftentimes a substantial number of features need to be collected in the analysis. In this case, large p…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-30 Shinyuu Lee , Yuru Zhu

Performing causal inference in observational studies requires we assume confounding variables are correctly adjusted for. G-computation methods are often used in these scenarios, with several recent proposals using Bayesian versions of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-25 Daniel Daly-Grafstein , Paul Gustafson

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-02 William H. Press

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-14 Yubai Yuan , Annie Qu

Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-05-17 Anders Ledberg

The study of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured spatially varying confounders has garnered increasing attention. However, a general framework for identifiability, which is critical for reliable causal inference from observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Tommy Tang , Xinran Li , Bo Li