Related papers: Counterexamples to "The Blessings of Multiple Caus…
(This comment has been updated to respond to Wang and Blei's rejoinder [arXiv:1910.07320].) The premise of the deconfounder method proposed in "Blessings of Multiple Causes" by Wang and Blei [arXiv:1805.06826], namely that a variable that…
This commentary has two goals. We first critically review the deconfounder method and point out its advantages and limitations. We then briefly consider three possible ways to address some of the limitations of the deconfounder method.
Wang and Blei (2019) studies multiple causal inference and proposes the deconfounder algorithm. The paper discusses theoretical requirements and presents empirical studies. Several refinements have been suggested around the theory of the…
The aim of this comment (set to appear in a formal discussion in JASA) is to draw out some conclusions from an extended back-and-forth I have had with Wang and Blei regarding the deconfounder method proposed in "The Blessings of Multiple…
Unobserved confounding is a major hurdle for causal inference from observational data. Confounders---the variables that affect both the causes and the outcome---induce spurious non-causal correlations between the two. Wang & Blei (2018)…
Ogburn et al. (2019, arXiv:1910.05438) discuss "The Blessings of Multiple Causes" (Wang and Blei, 2018, arXiv:1805.06826). Many of their remarks are interesting. But they also claim that the paper has "foundational errors" and that its…
Causal inference from observational data often assumes "ignorability," that all confounders are observed. This assumption is standard yet untestable. However, many scientific studies involve multiple causes, different variables whose…
Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…
Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…
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…
Confounding of three binary-variables counterfactual model is discussed in this paper. According to the effect between the control variable and the covariate variable, we investigate three counterfactual models: the control variable is…
This paper presents correct algorithms for answering the following two questions; (i) Does there exist a causal explanation consistent with a set of background knowledge which explains all of the observed independence facts in a sample?…
This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…
Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…
Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both…
Considerable attention has been given to the problem of non-monotonic reasoning in a belief function framework. Earlier work (M. Ginsberg) proposed solutions introducing meta-rules which recognized conditional independencies in a…
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…
Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…
We propose a general new method, the conditional permutation test, for testing the conditional independence of variables $X$ and $Y$ given a potentially high-dimensional random vector $Z$ that may contain confounding factors. The proposed…
For a continuous random variable $Z$, testing conditional independence $X \perp\!\!\!\perp Y |Z$ is known to be a particularly hard problem. It constitutes a key ingredient of many constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. These…