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How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…
Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…
Causal inference is capable of estimating the treatment effect (i.e., the causal effect of treatment on the outcome) to benefit the decision making in various domains. One fundamental challenge in this research is that the treatment…
Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…
Observational studies are valuable for estimating the effects of various medical interventions, but are notoriously difficult to evaluate because the methods used in observational studies require many untestable assumptions. This lack of…
Bridging the gap between internal and external validity is crucial for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs), favoured for their internal validity due to randomisation, often encounter challenges in…
In this paper we present tools for applied researchers that re-purpose off-the-shelf methods from the computer-science field of machine learning to create a "discovery engine" for data from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The applied…
Causal effect estimation seeks to determine the impact of an intervention from observational data. However, the existing causal inference literature primarily addresses treatment effects on frequently occurring events. But what if we are…
The health effects of environmental exposures have been studied for decades, typically using standard regression models to assess exposure-outcome associations found in observational non-experimental data. We propose and illustrate a…
Causal inference methods such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-differences are widely used to identify and estimate treatment effects. However, when outcomes are qualitative, their application poses…
In many causal inference applications, only one or a few units (or clusters of units) are treated. An important challenge in such settings is that standard inference methods relying on asymptotic theory may be unreliable, even with large…
Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…
Causal inferences from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) may not pertain to a target population where some effect modifiers have a different distribution. Prior work studies generalizing the results of a trial to a target population with…
The problem of using observed correlations to infer causal relations is relevant to a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Yet given correlations between just two classical variables, it is impossible to determine whether they arose from…
Case-control designs are an important tool in contrasting the effects of well-defined treatments. In this paper, we reconsider classical concepts, assumptions and principles and explore when the results of case-control studies can be…
Causal inference plays an important role in explanatory analysis and decision making across various fields like statistics, marketing, health care, and education. Its main task is to estimate treatment effects and make intervention…
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…
Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Causal discovery for purely observational, categorical data is a long-standing challenging problem. Unlike continuous data, the vast majority of existing methods for categorical data focus on inferring the Markov equivalence class only,…