English
Related papers

Related papers: Local search for efficient causal effect estimatio…

200 papers

The estimation of causal treatment effects from observational data is a fundamental problem in causal inference. To avoid bias, the effect estimator must control for all confounders. Hence practitioners often collect data for as many…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-05 Kristjan Greenewald , Dmitriy Katz-Rogozhnikov , Karthik Shanmugam

Estimating a causal query from observational data is an essential task in the analysis of biomolecular networks. Estimation takes as input a network topology, a query estimation method, and observational measurements on the network…

Finding an effective medical treatment often requires a search by trial and error. Making this search more efficient by minimizing the number of unnecessary trials could lower both costs and patient suffering. We formalize this problem as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Samuel Håkansson , Viktor Lindblom , Omer Gottesman , Fredrik D. Johansson

Observational data is increasingly used as a means for making individual-level causal predictions and intervention recommendations. The foremost challenge of causal inference from observational data is hidden confounding, whose presence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Nathan Kallus , Aahlad Manas Puli , Uri Shalit

Instrumental variable approaches have gained popularity for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However, the availability of instrumental variables in the primary dataset is often challenged due to stringent…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Kang Shuai , Shanshan Luo , Wei Li , Yangbo He

Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Sepehr Elahi , Sina Akbari , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash , Patrick Thiran

Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-18 Shanshan Luo , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li

We develop new methods to integrate experimental and observational data in causal inference. While randomized controlled trials offer strong internal validity, they are often costly and therefore limited in sample size. Observational data,…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-04 Xuelin Yang , Licong Lin , Susan Athey , Michael I. Jordan , Guido W. Imbens

We study the problem of causal effect identification from observational distribution given the causal graph and some context-specific independence (CSI) relations. It was recently shown that this problem is NP-hard, and while a sound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Ehsan Mokhtarian , Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

Causal discovery studies the problem of mining causal relationships between variables from data, which is of primary interest in science. During the past decades, significant amount of progresses have been made toward this fundamental data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-11-28 Kui Yu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu

Estimating how a treatment affects units individually, known as heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimation, is an essential part of decision-making and policy implementation. The accumulation of large amounts of data in many domains,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Christopher Tran , Elena Zheleva

When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical…

Unobserved confounding is one of the greatest challenges for causal discovery. The case in which unobserved variables have a widespread effect on many of the observed ones is particularly difficult because most pairs of variables are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

We are interested in learning causal relationships between pairs of random variables, purely from observational data. To effectively address this task, the state-of-the-art relies on strong assumptions regarding the mechanisms mapping…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-09-16 David Lopez-Paz , Krikamol Muandet , Benjamin Recht

In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Antti Pöllänen , Pekka Marttinen

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-08 Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

Observed associations in a database may be due in whole or part to variations in unrecorded (latent) variables. Identifying such variables and their causal relationships with one another is a principal goal in many scientific and practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Ricardo Silva , Richard Scheines , Clark Glymour , Peter L. Spirtes

Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the pillars of science; nevertheless, they rely on hand-crafted hypotheses and expensive analysis. Such constraints prevent causal effect estimation at scale, potentially anchoring on popular yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tommaso Mencattini , Riccardo Cadei , Francesco Locatello

Discovering the underlying dynamics of complex systems from data is an important practical topic. Constrained optimization algorithms are widely utilized and lead to many successes. Yet, such purely data-driven methods may bring about…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2023-05-17 Nan Chen , Yinling Zhang

A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Wenhao Zhang , Ramin Ramezani , Arash Naeim