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Measuring treatment effects in observational studies is challenging because of confounding bias. Confounding occurs when a variable affects both the treatment and the outcome. Traditional methods such as propensity score matching estimate…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-23 Bevan I. Smith , Charles Chimedza

Area-specific causal inference is important in many policy and survey applications, where the goal is to evaluate treatment effects for small geographic or demographic domains. Existing causal small area estimation methods, however,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-06 Tsubasa Ito , Shonosuke Sugasawa

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-10-03 Martin Huber

Causal structure learning refers to a process of identifying causal structures from observational data, and it can have multiple applications in biomedicine and health care. This paper provides a practical review and tutorial on scalable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-20 Pulakesh Upadhyaya , Kai Zhang , Can Li , Xiaoqian Jiang , Yejin Kim

Causal inference has numerous real-world applications in many domains, such as health care, marketing, political science, and online advertising. Treatment effect estimation, a fundamental problem in causal inference, has been extensively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Zhixuan Chu , Jianmin Huang , Ruopeng Li , Wei Chu , Sheng Li

Spatial confounding poses a significant challenge in scientific studies involving spatial data, where unobserved spatial variables can influence both treatment and outcome, possibly leading to spurious associations. To address this problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Mauricio Tec , Ana Trisovic , Michelle Audirac , Sophie Woodward , Jie Kate Hu , Naeem Khoshnevis , Francesca Dominici

We address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding, a setting where both treatment assignment and observed outcomes of individuals may be influenced by their neighbors within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Abhishek Dalvi , Neil Ashtekar , Vasant Honavar

Counterfactual thinking is a crucial yet challenging topic for artificial intelligence to learn knowledge from data and ultimately improve performance for new scenarios. Many research works, including the Potential Outcome Model (POM) and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Mingyu Kang , Duxin Chen , Ziyuan Pu , Jianxi Gao , Wenwu Yu

This paper focuses on the design of spatial experiments to optimize the amount of information derived from the experimental data and enhance the accuracy of the resulting causal effect estimator. We propose a surrogate function for the mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Jin Zhu , Jingyi Li , Hongyi Zhou , Yinan Lin , Zhenhua Lin , Chengchun Shi

Policy interventions can spill over to units of a population that are not directly exposed to the policy but are geographically close to the units receiving the intervention. In recent work, investigations of spillover effects on…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-14 Youjin Lee , Gary Hettinger , Nandita Mitra

This manuscript unites causal inference and spatial statistics, presenting novel insights for causal inference in spatial data analysis, and drawing from tools in spatial statistics to estimate causal effects. We introduce spatial causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-17 Georgia Papadogeorgou , Srijata Samanta

Inference about treatment effects for time-to-event outcomes is often obscured by the presence of competing events. A particularly complex situation arises when the treatment influences the occurrence of the competing event. A comprehensive…

Understanding what leads to effective conversations can aid the design of better computer-mediated communication platforms. In particular, prior observational work has sought to identify behaviors of individuals that correlate to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Justine Zhang , Sendhil Mullainathan , Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil

Recent developments in causal inference allow us to transport a causal effect of a time-fixed treatment from a randomized trial to a target population across space but within the same time frame. In contrast to transportability across…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-11 Laura Forastiere , Fan Li , Michela Baccini

This paper combines causal mediation analysis with double machine learning to control for observed confounders in a data-driven way under a selection-on-observables assumption in a high-dimensional setting. We consider the average indirect…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-02-17 Helmut Farbmacher , Martin Huber , Lukáš Lafférs , Henrika Langen , Martin Spindler

This paper discusses the problem of causal query in observational data with hidden variables, with the aim of seeking the change of an outcome when "manipulating" a variable while given a set of plausible confounding variables which affect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Le

We consider the design and analysis of multi-factor experiments using fractional factorial and incomplete designs within the potential outcome framework. These designs are particularly useful when limited resources make running a full…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-01-31 Nicole E. Pashley , Marie-Abele C. Bind

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are ideal for estimating causal effects, because the distributions of background covariates are similar in expectation across treatment groups. When estimating causal effects using observational data,…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-27 Anthony D. Scotina , Roee Gutman

This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Sohaib Kiani , Jared Barton , Jon Sushinsky , Lynda Heimbach , Bo Luo

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck