Related papers: What can be estimated? Identifiability, estimabili…
This paper clarifies a fundamental difference between causal inference and traditional statistical inference by formalizing a mathematical distinction between their respective parameters. We connect two major approaches to causal inference,…
Causal inference is often portrayed as fundamentally distinct from predictive modeling, with its own terminology, goals, and intellectual challenges. But at its core, causal inference is simply a structured instance of prediction under…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Understanding how much each variable contributes to an outcome is a central question across disciplines. A causal view of explainability is favorable for its ability in uncovering underlying mechanisms and generalizing to new contexts.…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
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…
Whether a variable is the cause of another, or simply associated with it, is often an important scientific question. Causal Inference is the name associated with the body of techniques for addressing that question in a statistical setting.…
A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…
The concept of causality has a controversial history. The question of whether it is possible to represent and address causal problems with probability theory, or if fundamentally new mathematics such as the do-calculus is required has been…
This paper discusses the fundamental principles of causal inference - the area of statistics that estimates the effect of specific occurrences, treatments, interventions, and exposures on a given outcome from experimental and observational…
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…
The problem of causal inference is to determine if a given probability distribution on observed variables is compatible with some causal structure. The difficult case is when the causal structure includes latent variables. We here introduce…
Despite the major advances taken in causal modeling, causality is still an unfamiliar topic for many statisticians. In this paper, it is demonstrated from the beginning to the end how causal effects can be estimated from observational data…
Machine learning algorithms can produce biased outcome/prediction, typically, against minorities and under-represented sub-populations. Therefore, fairness is emerging as an important requirement for the large scale application of machine…
We discuss recent work for causal inference and predictive robustness in a unifying way. The key idea relies on a notion of probabilistic invariance or stability: it opens up new insights for formulating causality as a certain risk…
Many statistical problems in causal inference involve a probability distribution other than the one from which data are actually observed; as an additional complication, the object of interest is often a marginal quantity of this other…
A wide variety of model explanation approaches have been proposed in recent years, all guided by very different rationales and heuristics. In this paper, we take a new route and cast interpretability as a statistical inference problem. We…
The assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (iid) is standard in many areas of statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, in some settings, such as social networks, infectious disease modeling, and…
Many research questions concern treatment effects on outcomes that can recur several times in the same individual. For example, medical researchers are interested in treatment effects on hospitalizations in heart failure patients and sports…
In this paper, we consider the problem of fair statistical inference involving outcome variables. Examples include classification and regression problems, and estimating treatment effects in randomized trials or observational data. The…