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Related papers: Reconciling Causality and Statistics

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The presence of latent variables can greatly complicate inferences about causal relations between measured variables from statistical data. In many cases, the presence of latent variables makes it impossible to determine for two measured…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-03-26 Peter L. Spirtes

This paper serves as a literature review of methodology concerning the (modern) causal inference methods to address the causal estimand with observational/survey data that have been or will be used in social science research. Mainly, this…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-08-02 Guanghui Pan

Despite the major advances taken in causal modeling, causality is still an unfamiliar topic for many statisticians. In this paper, it is demonstrated from the beginning to the end how causal effects can be estimated from observational data…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-07-03 Juha Karvanen

We review some approaches and philosophies of causal inference coming from sociology, economics, computer science, cognitive science, and statistics

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-04-02 Andrew Gelman

This paper clarifies a fundamental difference between causal inference and traditional statistical inference by formalizing a mathematical distinction between their respective parameters. We connect two major approaches to causal inference,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-29 Muye Liu , Jun Xie

The aim of this paper is to extend the framework of causal inference, in particular as it has been developed by Judea Pearl, in order to model actions and identify their intended effects, in the direction opened by Elisabeth Anscombe. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-16 Dario Compagno

With recent advances in natural language processing, rationalization becomes an essential self-explaining diagram to disentangle the black box by selecting a subset of input texts to account for the major variation in prediction. Yet,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Wenbo Zhang , Tong Wu , Yunlong Wang , Yong Cai , Hengrui Cai

In social sciences and economics, causal inference traditionally focuses on assessing the impact of predefined treatments (or interventions) on predefined outcomes, such as the effect of education programs on earnings. Causal discovery, in…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-12 Martin Huber

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

Over the past two decades, considerable strides have been made in advancing neuroscientific techniques, yet challenges remain in attributing causality to observed associations. This review addresses a fundamental issue in observational…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-11-04 Eric W. Bridgeford , Brian S. Caffo , Maya B. Mathur , Russell A. Poldrack

Causal inference is often portrayed as fundamentally distinct from predictive modeling, with its own terminology, goals, and intellectual challenges. But at its core, causal inference is simply a structured instance of prediction under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Carlos Fernández-Loría

Uncovering causal relationships in data is a major objective of data analytics. Causal relationships are normally discovered with designed experiments, e.g. randomised controlled trials, which, however are expensive or infeasible to be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-11-01 Jiuyong Li , Saisai Ma , Thuc Duy Le , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu

Modern Artificial Intelligence achieves remarkable predictive power by optimizing statistical risk functionals over vast corpora. Yet a gap separates this from genuine intelligence: the inability to distinguish correlation from causation.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Ernest Fokoué

We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-04-02 A. Philip Dawid , Monica Musio

We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic statistical causality (DT), which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-28 A. Philip Dawid

Perhaps the most prominent current definition of (actual) causality is due to Halpern and Pearl. It is defined using causal models (also known as structural equations models). We abstract the definition, extracting its key features, so that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Joseph Y. Halpern , Rafael Pass

Causal discovery problems use a set of observations to deduce causality between variables in the real world, typically to answer questions about biological or physical systems. These observations are often recorded at regular time…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-24 Kurt Butler , Damian Machlanski , Panagiotis Dimitrakopoulos , Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Comparison and contrast are the basic means to unveil causation and learn which treatments work. To build good comparison groups, randomized experimentation is key, yet often infeasible. In such non-experimental settings, we illustrate and…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 Ambarish Chattopadhyay , Jose R. Zubizarreta

Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-10 Liuyi Yao , Zhixuan Chu , Sheng Li , Yaliang Li , Jing Gao , Aidong Zhang

Discovering causal relationships is a hard task, often hindered by the need for intervention, and often requiring large amounts of data to resolve statistical uncertainty. However, humans quickly arrive at useful causal relationships. One…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-12-01 Pedro A. Ortega