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In observational studies, treatments are typically not randomized and therefore estimated treatment effects may be subject to confounding bias. The instrumental variable (IV) design plays the role of a quasi-experimental handle since the IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-30 Lan Liu , Wang Miao , Baoluo Sun , James Robins , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Instrumental variable methods provide useful tools for inferring causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To apply these methods with large-scale data sets, a major challenge is to find valid instruments from a possibly…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-24 Xinyi Zhang , Linbo Wang , Stanislav Volgushev , Dehan Kong

Instrumental variables (IV) estimation suffers selection bias when the analysis conditions on the treatment. Judea Pearl's early graphical definition of instrumental variables explicitly prohibited conditioning on the treatment.…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-20 Felix Elwert , Elan Segarra

Randomized experiments are the "gold standard" for estimating causal effects, yet often in practice, chance imbalances exist in covariate distributions between treatment groups. If covariate data are available before units are exposed to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-07-25 Kari Lock Morgan , Donald B. Rubin

To reach human level intelligence, learning algorithms need to incorporate causal reasoning. But identifying causality, and particularly counterfactual reasoning, remains elusive. In this paper, we make progress on counterfactual inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Marc Braun , Jose M. Peña , Adel Daoud

Instrumental variables (IV) are often used to identify causal effects in observational settings and experiments subject to non-compliance. Under canonical assumptions, IVs allow us to identify a so-called local average treatment effect…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-03 Luca Locher , Mats J. Stensrud , Aaron L. Sarvet

With nonignorable nonresponse, an effective method to construct valid estimators of population parameters is to use a covariate vector called instrument that can be excluded from the nonresponse propensity but are still useful covariate…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Ji Chen , Jun Shao

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-01-17 Peng Ding , Tyler VanderWeele , James Robins

Time-to-event analyses are often plagued by both -- possibly unmeasured -- confounding and competing risks. To deal with the former, the use of instrumental variables for effect estimation is rapidly gaining ground. We show how to make use…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-04 Torben Martinussen , Stijn Vansteelandt

In pharmacoepidemiology research, instrumental variables (IVs) are variables that strongly predict treatment but have no causal effect on the outcome of interest except through the treatment. There remain concerns about the inclusion of IVs…

Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) are considered a promising recipe to deliver better policy interventions. One key ingredient in optimal ITR estimation problems is to estimate the average treatment effect conditional on a subject's…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-16 Hongming Pu , Bo Zhang

Matching is a widely used causal inference design that aims to approximate a randomized experiment using observational data by forming matched sets of treated and control units based on similarities in their covariates. Ideally, treated…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-06 Jianan Zhu , Jeffrey Zhang , Zijian Guo , Siyu Heng

Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-10 Ricardo Silva , Shohei Shimizu

Balancing influential covariates is crucial for valid treatment comparisons in clinical studies. While covariate-adaptive randomization is commonly used to achieve balance, its performance can be inadequate when the number of baseline…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-30 Ziqing Guo , Yang Liu , Lucy Xia

To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-01 Roy S. Zawadzki , Joshua D. Grill , Daniel L. Gillen

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a widely-used method to estimate the causal relationship between a risk factor and disease. A fundamental part of any MR analysis is to choose appropriate genetic variants as instrumental variables.…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-26 Ashish Patel , Francis J. DiTraglia , Verena Zuber , Stephen Burgess

We consider the conditional randomization test as a way to account for covariate imbalance in randomized experiments. The test accounts for covariate imbalance by comparing the observed test statistic to the null distribution of the test…

Instrumental variable (IV) strategies are widely used in political science to establish causal relationships. However, the identifying assumptions required by an IV design are demanding, and it remains challenging for researchers to assess…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-08 Apoorva Lal , Mac Lockhart , Yiqing Xu , Ziwen Zu

Instrumental variables (IVs) are often continuous, arising in diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Existing approaches for continuous IVs typically impose strong parametric models or assume homogeneous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Mei Dong , Lin Liu , Dingke Tang , Geoffrey Liu , Wei Xu , Linbo Wang

In recent years, there is a growing body of causal inference literature focusing on covariate balancing methods. These methods eliminate observed confounding by equalizing covariate moments between the treated and control groups. The…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-14 Xialing Wen , Ying Yan