Related papers: Comment: Reflections on the Deconfounder
Traditional recommender systems aim to estimate a user's rating to an item based on observed ratings from the population. As with all observational studies, hidden confounders, which are factors that affect both item exposures and user…
Making causal inferences from observational studies can be challenging when confounders are missing not at random. In such cases, identifying causal effects is often not guaranteed. Motivated by a real example, we consider a…
A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…
The empirical practice of using factor models to adjust for shared, unobserved confounders, $\mathbf{Z}$, in observational settings with multiple treatments, $\mathbf{A}$, is widespread in fields including genetics, networks, medicine, and…
Many applications of computational social science aim to infer causal conclusions from non-experimental data. Such observational data often contains confounders, variables that influence both potential causes and potential effects.…
The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some…
Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…
A key challenge in causal inference from observational studies is the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for causal inference that…
This paper addresses the problem of measurement errors in causal inference and highlights several algebraic and graphical methods for eliminating systematic bias induced by such errors. In particulars, the paper discusses the control of…
Mechanistic interpretability papers increasingly use causal vocabulary: circuits, mediators, causal abstraction, monosemanticity. Such claims require explicit identification assumptions. A purposive audit of 10 papers across four…
Analyses of causal mediation often involve exposure-induced confounders or, relatedly, multiple mediators. In such applications, researchers aim to estimate a variety of different quantities, including interventional direct and indirect…
We study identification and estimation of causal effects in settings with panel data. Traditionally researchers follow model-based identification strategies relying on assumptions governing the relation between the potential outcomes and…
Over the past few decades, addressing "spatial confounding" has become a major topic in spatial statistics. However, the literature has provided conflicting definitions, and many proposed solutions are tied to specific analysis models and…
In this discussion we consider why it is important to estimate causal effect parameters well even they are not identified, propose a partially identified approach for causal inference in the presence of colliders, point out an…
Causal inference in spatial domains faces two intertwined challenges: (1) unmeasured spatial factors, such as weather, air pollution, or mobility, that confound treatment and outcome, and (2) interference from nearby treatments that violate…
Identification of treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is a persistent problem in the social, biological, and medical sciences. The problem of unmeasured confounding in settings with multiple treatments is most common…
The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…
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…
We consider a causal effect that is confounded by an unobserved variable, but with observed proxy variables of the confounder. We show that, with at least two independent proxy variables satisfying a certain rank condition, the causal…
An important problem in causal inference is to break down the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into different causal pathways and to quantify the causal effect in each pathway. For instance, in causal fairness, the total effect of…