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A fundamental limitation of causal inference in observational studies is that perceived evidence for an effect might instead be explained by factors not accounted for in the primary analysis. Methods for assessing the sensitivity of a…
While sample sizes in randomized clinical trials are large enough to estimate the average treatment effect well, they are often insufficient for estimation of treatment-covariate interactions critical to studying data-driven precision…
Ordinal categorical data are widely collected in psychology, education, and other social sciences, appearing commonly in questionnaires, assessments, and surveys. Latent class models provide a flexible framework for uncovering unobserved…
A growing number of methods aim to assess the challenging question of treatment effect variation in observational studies. This special section of "Observational Studies" reports the results of a workshop conducted at the 2018 Atlantic…
There are many scenarios where short- and long-term causal effects of an intervention are different. For example, low-quality ads may increase short-term ad clicks but decrease the long-term revenue via reduced clicks. This work, therefore,…
Methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) from observational data have largely focused on continuous or binary outcomes, with less attention paid to survival outcomes and almost none to settings with competing risks. In…
Consider an experiment involving a potentially small number of subjects. Some random variables are observed on each subject: a high-dimensional one called the "observed" random variable, and a one-dimensional one called the "outcome" random…
Omitted variables are one of the most important threats to the identification of causal effects. Several widely used methods assess the impact of omitted variables on empirical conclusions by comparing measures of selection on observables…
This paper develops a method to conduct causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounders by leveraging networks with homophily, a frequently observed tendency to form edges with similar nodes. I introduce a concept of asymptotic…
In industry, online randomized controlled experiment (a.k.a. A/B experiment) is a standard approach to measure the impact of a causal change. These experiments have small treatment effect to reduce the potential blast radius. As a result,…
When evaluating the performance of clinical machine learning models, one must consider the deployment population. When the population of patients with observed labels is only a subset of the deployment population (label selection), standard…
There is wide agreement on the importance of implementation data from randomized effectiveness studies in behavioral science; however, there are few methods available to incorporate these data into causal models, especially when they are…
The primary goal of randomized trials is to compare the effects of different interventions on some outcome of interest. In addition to the treatment assignment and outcome, data on baseline covariates, such as demographic characteristics or…
Accurate estimation of treatment effects is essential for decision-making across various scientific fields. This task, however, becomes challenging in areas like social sciences and online marketplaces, where treating one experimental unit…
Statistical power is often a concern for clustered RCTs due to variance inflation from design effects and the high cost of adding study clusters (such as hospitals, schools, or communities). While covariate pre-specification is the…
In this paper, we propose a robust method to estimate the average treatment effects in observational studies when the number of potential confounders is possibly much greater than the sample size. We first use a class of penalized…
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…
Much evidence in comparative effectiveness research is based on observational studies. Researchers who conduct observational studies typically assume that there are no unobservable differences between the treated and control groups.…
In observational studies, researchers must select a method to control for confounding. Options include propensity score methods and regression. It remains unclear how dataset characteristics (size, overlap in propensity scores, exposure…
Scholars of social stratification often study exposures that shape life outcomes. But some outcomes (such as wage) only exist for some people (such as those who are employed). We show how a common practice -- dropping cases with…