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In the estimation of causal effects, one common method for removing the influence of confounders is to adjust the variables that satisfy the back-door criterion. However, it is not always possible to uniquely determine sets of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Atsushi Noda , Takashi Isozaki

Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Amanda Gentzel , Dan Garant , David Jensen

Additive noise models (ANMs) are an important setting studied in causal inference. Most of the existing works on ANMs assume causal sufficiency, i.e., there are no unobserved confounders. This paper focuses on confounded ANMs, where a set…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-16 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Mahsa Ghasemi , Murat Kocaoglu

We consider a causal effect that is confounded by an unobserved variable, but with observed proxy variables of the confounder. We show that, with at least two independent proxy variables satisfying a certain rank condition, the causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-29 Wang Miao , Zhi Geng , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Many methods for causal inference generate directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that formalize causal relations between $n$ variables. Given the joint distribution on all these variables, the DAG contains all information about how intervening on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-01-29 Dominik Janzing , David Balduzzi , Moritz Grosse-Wentrup , Bernhard Schölkopf

Missing exposure information is a very common feature of many observational studies. Here we study identifiability and efficient estimation of causal effects on vector outcomes, in such cases where treatment is unconfounded but partially…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-04 Edward H. Kennedy

A structural causal model is made of endogenous (manifest) and exogenous (latent) variables. We show that endogenous observations induce linear constraints on the probabilities of the exogenous variables. This allows to exactly map a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Zaffalon , Alessandro Antonucci , Rafael Cabañas

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

Methods for inferring average causal effects have traditionally relied on two key assumptions: (i) the intervention received by one unit cannot causally influence the outcome of another; and (ii) units can be organized into non-overlapping…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-08-23 Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , Isabel Fulcher , Ilya Shpitser

To unbiasedly estimate a causal effect on an outcome unconfoundedness is often assumed. If there is sufficient knowledge on the underlying causal structure then existing confounder selection criteria can be used to select subsets of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-20 Jenny Häggström

Estimating long-term causal effects by combining long-term observational and short-term experimental data is a crucial but challenging problem in many real-world scenarios. In existing methods, several ideal assumptions, e.g. latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Ruichu Cai , Junjie Wan , Weilin Chen , Zeqin Yang , Zijian Li , Peng Zhen , Jiecheng Guo

We introduce priors and algorithms to perform Bayesian inference in Gaussian models defined by acyclic directed mixed graphs. Such a class of graphs, composed of directed and bi-directed edges, is a representation of conditional…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-07-02 Ricardo Silva , Zoubin Ghahramani

Standard diffusion models are flexible estimators of complex distributions, but they do not encode causal structures and therefore do not by themselves support causal analysis. We propose a causality-encoded diffusion framework that…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-24 Li Chen , Xiaotong Shen , Wei Pan

Causal inference is often portrayed as fundamentally distinct from predictive modeling, with its own terminology, goals, and intellectual challenges. But at its core, causal inference is simply a structured instance of prediction under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Carlos Fernández-Loría

Causal inference from observational data is crucial for many disciplines such as medicine and economics. However, sharp bounds for causal effects under relaxations of the unconfoundedness assumption (causal sensitivity analysis) are subject…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

Predicting the effect of unseen interventions is a fundamental research question across the data sciences. It is well established that in general such questions cannot be answered definitively from observational data. This realization has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Alexis Bellot

Whereas confidence intervals are used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured individuals, confounding intervals can be used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured attributes. Previously, we have introduced a methodology for computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-13 Brian Knaeble , R Mitchell Hughes

Instrumental variable methods provide a powerful approach to estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. But a key challenge when applying them is the reliance on untestable "exclusion" assumptions that rule out any…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-23 Jason Hartford , Victor Veitch , Dhanya Sridhar , Kevin Leyton-Brown

We consider the problem of learning causal models from observational data generated by linear non-Gaussian acyclic causal models with latent variables. Without considering the effect of latent variables, one usually infers wrong causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Saber Salehkaleybar , AmirEmad Ghassami , Negar Kiyavash , Kun Zhang

Causal graphs may inform covariate adjustment for estimating causal effects and improve estimation efficiency by exploiting the graphical structure. In many applications, however, the target causal parameter may not be point-identified due…