English
Related papers

Related papers: Confounding Feature Acquisition for Causal Effect …

200 papers

Causal inference in observational studies is notoriously difficult, due to the fact that the experimenter is not in charge of the treatment assignment mechanism. Many potential con- founding factors (PCFs) exist in such a scenario, and if…

Applications · Statistics 2015-09-15 Vadim von Brzeski , Matt Taddy , David Draper

The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Olivier Jeunen , Ciarán M. Gilligan-Lee , Rishabh Mehrotra , Mounia Lalmas

Observational studies can play a useful role in assessing the comparative effectiveness of competing treatments. In a clinical trial the randomization of participants to treatment and control groups generally results in well-balanced groups…

Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-01-17 Peng Ding , Tyler VanderWeele , James Robins

We propose an approach to estimate the effect of multiple simultaneous interventions in the presence of hidden confounders. To overcome the problem of hidden confounding, we consider the setting where we have access to not only the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-17 Sorawit Saengkyongam , Ricardo Silva

Understanding the effects of interventions is central to scientific progress, with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarded as the gold standard for causal inference in many applied fields. However, RCTs are costly, time-consuming, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-27 Drago Plecko , Patrik Okanovic , Torsten Hoefler , Elias Bareinboim

In most nonrandomized observational studies, differences between treatment groups may arise not only due to the treatment but also because of the effect of confounders. Therefore, causal inference regarding the treatment effect is not as…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-04 Debashis Ghosh

Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

Data from both a randomized trial and an observational study are sometimes simultaneously available for evaluating the effect of an intervention. The randomized data typically allows for reliable estimation of average treatment effects but…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-01 David Cheng , Tianxi Cai

Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-09 Lin Gui , Victor Veitch

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Thuc Duy Le , Jixue Liu

For observational studies, we study the sensitivity of causal inference when treatment assignments may depend on unobserved confounders. We develop a loss minimization approach for estimating bounds on the conditional average treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-11 Steve Yadlowsky , Hongseok Namkoong , Sanjay Basu , John Duchi , Lu Tian

We consider the problem of estimating a causal effect in a multi-domain setting. The causal effect of interest is confounded by an unobserved confounder and can change between the different domains. We assume that we have access to a proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Manuel Iglesias-Alonso , Felix Schur , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas Peters

Confounding matters in almost all observational studies that focus on causality. In order to eliminate bias caused by connfounders, oftentimes a substantial number of features need to be collected in the analysis. In this case, large p…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-30 Shinyuu Lee , Yuru Zhu

Valid causal inference in observational studies often requires controlling for confounders. However, in practice measurements of confounders may be noisy, and can lead to biased estimates of causal effects. We show that we can reduce the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Madeleine Udell

Estimating causal effects is vital for decision making. In standard causal effect estimation, treatments are usually binary- or continuous-valued. However, in many important real-world settings, treatments can be structured,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-02 Oriol Corcoll Andreu , Athanasios Vlontzos , Michael O'Riordan , Ciaran M. Gilligan-Lee

Accurately estimating treatment effects over time is crucial in fields such as precision medicine, epidemiology, economics, and marketing. Many current methods for estimating treatment effects over time assume that all confounders are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Mouad El Bouchattaoui , Myriam Tami , Benoit Lepetit , Paul-Henry Cournède

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-24 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Although randomized experiments are widely regarded as the gold standard for estimating causal effects, missing data of the pretreatment covariates makes it challenging to estimate the subgroup causal effects. When the missing data…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-01-08 Peng Ding , Zhi Geng