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We study the identification and estimation of long-term treatment effects when both experimental and observational data are available. Since the long-term outcome is observed only after a long delay, it is not measured in the experimental…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-04 Guido Imbens , Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Yuhao Wang

Estimating long-term causal effects by combining long-term observational and short-term experimental data is a crucial but challenging problem in many real-world scenarios. In existing methods, several ideal assumptions, e.g. latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Ruichu Cai , Junjie Wan , Weilin Chen , Zeqin Yang , Zijian Li , Peng Zhen , Jiecheng Guo

We propose nonparametric identification and semiparametric estimation of joint potential outcome distributions in the presence of confounding. First, in settings with observed confounding, we derive tighter, covariate-informed bounds on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-19 Jianle Sun , Kun Zhang

Most existing debiasing methods for multimodal models, including causal intervention and inference methods, utilize approximate heuristics to represent the biases, such as shallow features from early stages of training or unimodal features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Vaidehi Patil , Adyasha Maharana , Mohit Bansal

We consider the the problem of identifying causal effects given a high-dimensional treatment vector in the presence of low-dimensional latent confounders. We assume a parametric structural causal model in which the outcome is permitted to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-11 Yuhao Wang , Rajen Shah

A common concern when trying to draw causal inferences from observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding. In practice, many of the covariates may only be proxies of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-31 Oliver Dukes , Ilya Shpitser , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs in the observational study is crucial but challenging, due to the presence of unmeasured confounding. While previous methods employed the negative controls to adjust for the confounding…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-21 Yong Wu , Yanwei Fu , Shouyan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Xinwei Sun

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental obstacle to establishing valid causal conclusions from observational data. Two complementary types of approaches have been developed to address this obstacle: obtaining identification using fortuitous…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-27 Ilya Shpitser , Zach Wood-Doughty , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

The fundamental problem in treatment effect estimation from observational data is confounder identification and balancing. Most of the previous methods realized confounder balancing by treating all observed pre-treatment variables as…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Junkun Yuan , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Qiang Zhu , Yueting Zhuang , Fei Wu

We propose a Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) approach to causal inference using observational data consisting of outcome, treatment, and a set of confounders. The conditional distribution of the outcome given treatment and confounders is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-01 Yongseok Hur , Joonhyuk Jung , Juhee Lee

Recommender systems aim to recommend new items to users by learning user and item representations. In practice, these representations are highly entangled as they consist of information about multiple factors, including user's interests,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Paras Sheth , Ruocheng Guo , Lu Cheng , Huan Liu , K. Selçuk Candan

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-24 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

Concept-based explanation approach is a popular model interpertability tool because it expresses the reasons for a model's predictions in terms of concepts that are meaningful for the domain experts. In this work, we study the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Mohammad Taha Bahadori , David E. Heckerman

A major challenge in estimating treatment effects in observational studies is the reliance on untestable conditions such as the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can falsify the assumption…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-03 Rickard K. A. Karlsson , Jesse H. Krijthe

The era of big data has witnessed an increasing availability of multiple data sources for statistical analyses. We consider estimation of causal effects combining big main data with unmeasured confounders and smaller validation data with…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-24 Shu Yang , Peng Ding

When performing causal discovery, assumptions have to be made on how the true causal mechanism corresponds to the underlying joint probability distribution. These assumptions are labeled as causal razors in this work. We review numerous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Wai-yin Lam

Most causal inference methods focus on estimating marginal average treatment effects, but many important causal estimands depend on the joint distribution of potential outcomes, including the probability of causation and proportions…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-16 Zach Shahn , David Madigan

Estimation of causal effects involves crucial assumptions about the data-generating process, such as directionality of effect, presence of instrumental variables or mediators, and whether all relevant confounders are observed. Violation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Amit Sharma , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Cheng Zhang , Emre Kıcıman

We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Kailash Budhathoki , Mario Boley , Jilles Vreeken

A key condition for obtaining reliable estimates of the causal effect of a treatment is overlap (a.k.a. positivity): the distributions of the features used to perform causal adjustment cannot be too different in the treated and control…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-14 Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks