Related papers: From controlled to undisciplined data: estimating …
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…
Researchers are often challenged with assessing the impact of an intervention on an outcome of interest in situations where the intervention is non-randomised, the intervention is only applied to one or few units, the intervention is…
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…
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…
The interpretability of prediction mechanisms with respect to the underlying prediction problem is often unclear. While several studies have focused on developing prediction models with meaningful parameters, the causal relationships…
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…
This paper develops a Bayesian framework for robust causal inference from longitudinal observational data. Many contemporary methods rely on structural assumptions, such as factor models, to adjust for unobserved confounding, but they can…
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…
Estimation of causal effects is the core objective of many scientific disciplines. However, it remains a challenging task, especially when the effects are estimated from observational data. Recently, several promising machine learning…
While many areas of machine learning have benefited from the increasing availability of large and varied datasets, the benefit to causal inference has been limited given the strong assumptions needed to ensure identifiability of causal…
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…
A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature…
Inferring causal effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to treatment. Observational studies in infectious disease research present the additional challenge that one participant's treatment…
Randomized experiments in which the treatment of a unit can affect the outcomes of other units are becoming increasingly common in healthcare, economics, and in the social and information sciences. From a causal inference perspective, the…
Most traditional models of uncertainty have focused on the associational relationship among variables as captured by conditional dependence. In order to successfully manage intelligent systems for decision making, however, we must be able…
We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…
The fundamental challenge of drawing causal inference is that counterfactual outcomes are not fully observed for any unit. Furthermore, in observational studies, treatment assignment is likely to be confounded. Many statistical methods have…
Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…
The causal assumptions, the study design and the data are the elements required for scientific inference in empirical research. The research is adequately communicated only if all of these elements and their relations are described…
Relationship between two popular modeling frameworks of causal inference from observational data, namely, causal graphical model and potential outcome causal model is discussed. How some popular causal effect estimators found in…