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New text as data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to inductively discover measures that are useful for testing social science theories of interest from large collections of text. We introduce a conceptual framework for making…
Causal inference from observational data can be viewed as a missing data problem arising from a hypothetical population-scale randomized trial matched to the observational study. This links a target trial protocol with a corresponding…
Many decisions in healthcare, business, and other policy domains are made without the support of rigorous evidence due to the cost and complexity of performing randomized experiments. Using observational data to answer causal questions is…
This chapter covers different approaches to policy evaluation for assessing the causal effect of a treatment or intervention on an outcome of interest. As an introduction to causal inference, the discussion starts with the experimental…
When estimating treatment effects, the golden standard is to conduct a randomized experiment and then contrast outcomes associated with the treatment group and the control group. However, in many cases, randomized experiments are either…
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…
We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds…
Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying…
Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data…
Causal inference is the process of estimating the effect or impact of a treatment on an outcome with other covariates as potential confounders (and mediators) that may need to be controlled. The vast majority of existing methods and systems…
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…
This paper introduces a collection of four data sets, similar to Anscombe's Quartet, that aim to highlight the challenges involved when estimating causal effects. Each of the four data sets is generated based on a distinct causal mechanism:…
In randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that focus on time-to-event outcomes, intercurrent events can arise in two ways: as semi-competing events, which modify the hazard of the primary outcome events, or as competing events, which make the…
As any scientific discipline, the software engineering (SE) research community strives to contribute to the betterment of the target population of our research: software producers and consumers. We will only achieve this betterment if we…
The causal effect of an intervention (treatment/exposure) on an outcome can be estimated by: i) specifying knowledge about the data-generating process; ii) assessing under what assumptions a target quantity, such as for example a causal…
We give a selective review of some recent developments in causal inference, intended for researchers who are not familiar with graphical models and causality, and with a focus on methods that are applicable to large data sets. We mainly…
Data scarcity is a tremendous challenge in causal effect estimation. In this paper, we propose to exploit additional data sources to facilitate estimating causal effects in the target population. Specifically, we leverage additional source…
Causal effect estimation from observational data is a challenging problem, especially with high dimensional data and in the presence of unobserved variables. The available data-driven methods for tackling the problem either provide an…
In many fields of scientific research and real-world applications, unbiased estimation of causal effects from non-experimental data is crucial for understanding the mechanism underlying the data and for decision-making on effective…
In clinical trials, inferences on clinical outcomes are often made conditional on specific selective processes. For instance, only when a treatment demonstrates a significant effect on the primary outcome, further analysis is conducted to…