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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

Most of the widely used estimators of the average treatment effect (ATE) in causal inference rely on the assumptions of unconfoundedness and overlap. Unconfoundedness requires that the observed covariates account for all correlations…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Yang Cai , Alkis Kalavasis , Katerina Mamali , Anay Mehrotra , Manolis Zampetakis

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for measuring causal effects. However, they are often not always feasible, and causal treatment effects must be estimated from observational data. Observational studies do not allow robust…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-08 Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Sonali Parbhoo , Shalmali Joshi , Finale Doshi-Velez

Recent methodological research in causal inference has focused on effects of stochastic interventions, which assign treatment randomly, often according to subject-specific covariates. In this work, we demonstrate that the usual notion of…

Causal or unconfounded descriptive comparisons between multiple groups are common in observational studies. Motivated from a racial disparity study in health services research, we propose a unified propensity score weighting framework, the…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-10 Fan Li , Fan Li

In this paper, we consider recent progress in estimating the average treatment effect when extreme inverse probability weights are present and focus on methods that account for a possible violation of the positivity assumption. These…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-26 Roland A. Matsouaka , Yunji Zhou

Estimation of individual treatment effects is commonly used as the basis for contextual decision making in fields such as healthcare, education, and economics. However, it is often sufficient for the decision maker to have estimates of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Maggie Makar , Fredrik D. Johansson , John Guttag , David Sontag

We provide novel bounds on average treatment effects (on the treated) that are valid under an unconfoundedness assumption. Our bounds are designed to be robust in challenging situations, for example, when the conditioning variables take on…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-12 Sokbae Lee , Martin Weidner

Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-10-19 Antti Hyttinen , Frederick Eberhardt , Patrik O. Hoyer

Due to unmeasured confounding, it is often not possible to identify causal effects from a postulated model. Nevertheless, we can ask for partial identification, which usually boils down to finding upper and lower bounds of a causal quantity…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Jakob Zeitler , Ricardo Silva

In observational studies, the assumption of sufficient overlap (positivity) is fundamental for the identification and estimation of causal effects. Failing to account for this assumption yields inaccurate and potentially infeasible…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-07 Jaehyuk Jang , Suehyun Kim , Kwonsang Lee

It has recently become popular to define treatment effects for subsets of the target population characterized by variables not observable at the time a treatment decision is made. Characterizing and estimating such treatment effects is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-08-30 Marshall M. Joffe , Dylan Small , Chi-Yuan Hsu

Imbalances in covariates between treatment groups are frequent in observational studies and can lead to biased comparisons. Various adjustment methods can be employed to correct these biases in the context of multi-level treatments ($>$ 2).…

Applications · Statistics 2021-06-04 Diop S. Arona , Duchesne Thierry , Cumming Steven , Diop Awa , Talbot Denis

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a challenging problem, especially with high dimensional data and in the presence of unobserved variables. The available data-driven methods for tackling the problem either provide an…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Oversubscribed treatments are often allocated using randomized waiting lists. Applicants are ranked randomly, and treatment offers are made following that ranking until all seats are filled. To estimate causal effects, researchers often…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-24 Clement de Chaisemartin , Luc Behaghel

Trust in predictions made by machine learning models is increased if the model generalizes well on previously unseen samples and when inference is accompanied by cogent explanations of the reasoning behind predictions. In the image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Edward Verenich , Alvaro Velasquez , Nazar Khan , Faraz Hussain

This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers--one person's treatment may affect another's outcome--and one-sided non-compliance--subjects can…

Factorial experiments are ubiquitous in the social and biomedical sciences, but when units fail to comply with each assigned factors, identification and estimation of the average treatment effects become impossible without strong…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Matthew Blackwell , Nicole E. Pashley