Related papers: Generalizing causal inferences from randomized tri…
Researchers are frequently interested in understanding the causal effect of treatment interventions. However, in some cases, the treatment of interest--readily available in a randomized controlled trial (RCT)--is either not directly…
Clinical trials usually target average treatment effects, but treatment decisions are made for individuals. This tension motivates a common criticism of evidence-based medicine: a treatment that is beneficial on average may be inappropriate…
Randomized controlled trials often enroll participants whose characteristics differ from those of a target population, which can limit the generalizability of the estimated treatment effects when effect modifiers differ across populations.…
This PhD thesis contains several contributions to the field of statistical causal modeling. Statistical causal models are statistical models embedded with causal assumptions that allow for the inference and reasoning about the behavior of…
Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…
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…
Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed…
When considering the effect a treatment will cause in a population of interest, we often look to evidence from randomized controlled trials. In settings where multiple trials on a treatment are available, we may wish to synthesize the…
Epidemiologists and applied statisticians often believe that relative effect measures conditional on covariates, such as risk ratios and mean ratios, are ``transportable'' across populations. Here, we examine the identification of causal…
This paper introduces a simple framework of counterfactual estimation for causal inference with time-series cross-sectional data, in which we estimate the average treatment effect on the treated by directly imputing counterfactual outcomes…
The widely used 'Counterfactual' definition of Causal Effects was derived for unbiasedness and accuracy - and not generalizability. We propose a Combinatorial definition for the External Validity (EV) of intervention effects. We first…
Given a causal graph representing the data-generating process shared across different domains/distributions, enforcing sufficient graph-implied conditional independencies can identify domain-general (non-spurious) feature representations.…
Practitioners in diverse fields such as healthcare, economics and education are eager to apply machine learning to improve decision making. The cost and impracticality of performing experiments and a recent monumental increase in electronic…
We argue that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are special even among settings where average treatment effects are identified by a nonparametric unconfoundedness assumption. This claim follows from two results of Robins and Ritov (1997):…
Estimation of local average treatment effects in randomized trials typically requires an assumption known as the exclusion restriction in cases where we are unwilling to rule out unmeasured confounding. Under this assumption, any benefit…
We consider a causal inference model in which individuals interact in a social network and they may not comply with the assigned treatments. In particular, we suppose that the form of network interference is unknown to researchers. To…
Causal inference with observational data can be performed under an assumption of no unobserved confounders (unconfoundedness assumption). There is, however, seldom clear subject-matter or empirical evidence for such an assumption. We…
Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…
Principal stratification is a popular framework for causal inference in the presence of an intermediate outcome. While the principal average treatment effects are the standard target of inference, they may be insufficient when interest lies…
In longitudinal studies where units are embedded in space or a social network, interference may arise, meaning that a unit's outcome can depend on treatment histories of others. The presence of interference poses significant challenges for…