Related papers: RealCause: Realistic Causal Inference Benchmarking

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,…

Causal effect estimation from observational data is one of the essential problems in causal inference. However, most estimation methods rely on the strong assumption that all confounders are observed, which is impractical and untestable in…

The predominant method for evaluating the quality of causal models is to measure the graphical accuracy of the learned model structure. We present an alternative method for evaluating causal models that directly measures the accuracy of…

With increasing data availability, causal effects can be evaluated across different data sets, both randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies. RCTs isolate the effect of the treatment from that of unwanted (confounding)…

Many applications of computational social science aim to infer causal conclusions from non-experimental data. Such observational data often contains confounders, variables that influence both potential causes and potential effects.…

Substantial advances in Bayesian methods for causal inference have been developed in recent years. We provide an introduction to Bayesian inference for causal effects for practicing statisticians who have some familiarity with Bayesian…

We consider assessing causal mediation in the presence of a post-treatment event (examples include noncompliance, a clinical event, or death). We identify natural mediation effects for the entire study population and for each principal…

In application domains such as healthcare, we want accurate predictive models that are also causally interpretable. In pursuit of such models, we propose a causal regularizer to steer predictive models towards causally-interpretable…

We describe a design-based framework for drawing causal inference in general randomized experiments. Causal effects are defined as linear functionals evaluated at unit-level potential outcome functions. Assumptions about the potential…

A popular technique for selecting and tuning machine learning estimators is cross-validation. Cross-validation evaluates overall model fit, usually in terms of predictive accuracy. In causal inference, the optimal choice of estimator…

Causal inference is central to scientific discovery, yet choosing appropriate methods remains challenging because of the complexity of both statistical methodology and real-world data. Inspired by the success of artificial intelligence in…

The assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (iid) is standard in many areas of statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, in some settings, such as social networks, infectious disease modeling, and…

Learning causal relationships from time series data is an important but challenging problem. Existing synthetic datasets often contain hidden artifacts that can be exploited by causal discovery methods, reducing their usefulness for…

The propensity score is a common tool for estimating the causal effect of a binary treatment in observational data. In this setting, matching, subclassification, imputation, or inverse probability weighting on the propensity score can…

When inferring the causal effect of one variable on another from correlational data, a common practice by professional researchers as well as lay decision makers is to control for some set of exogenous confounding variables. Choosing an…

Causal discovery estimates the underlying physical process that generates the observed data: does X cause Y or does Y cause X? Current methodologies use structural conditions to turn the causal query into a statistical query, when only…

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal…

This paper aims to provide practitioners of causal mediation analysis with a better understanding of estimation options. We take as inputs two familiar strategies (weighting and model-based prediction) and a simple way of combining them…

Causal inference is the goal of randomized trials and many observational studies. The first step in a formal causal inference framework is to define the causal estimand, and in both types of study this can be intuitively defined as the…