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Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

The instrumental variable (IV) design is a common approach to address hidden confounding bias. For validity, an IV must impact the outcome only through its association with the treatment. In addition, IV identification has required a…

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a widely used way to estimate the causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data with latent confounders. A standard IV is expected to be related to the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

To reach human level intelligence, learning algorithms need to incorporate causal reasoning. But identifying causality, and particularly counterfactual reasoning, remains elusive. In this paper, we make progress on counterfactual inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Marc Braun , Jose M. Peña , Adel Daoud

This paper studies the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from observational data, in the presence of unobserved confounders. The two-stage least square (TSLS) method and its variants with a standard instrumental variable (IV)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Instrumental variable (IV) is a powerful approach to inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data even when there exist latent confounders between the treatment and the outcome. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Lee , Jixue Liu

Instrumental variables (IVs) are crucial for addressing unobservable confounders, yet their stringent exogeneity assumptions pose significant challenges in networked data. Existing methods typically rely on modelling neighbour information…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhirong Huang , Debo Cheng , Guixian Zhang , Yi Wang , Jiuyong Li , Shichao Zhang

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is commonly used to infer causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Existing methods typically aim to estimate the mean causal effects, whereas a few other methods focus on quantile…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-13 Anastasiia Holovchak , Sorawit Saengkyongam , Nicolai Meinshausen , Xinwei Shen

The method of instrumental variables (IV) provides a framework to study causal effects in both randomized experiments with noncompliance and in observational studies where natural circumstances produce as-if random nudges to accept…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-07 Hyunseung Kang , Laura Peck , Luke Keele

Instrumental variables (IVs) are often continuous, arising in diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Existing approaches for continuous IVs typically impose strong parametric models or assume homogeneous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Mei Dong , Lin Liu , Dingke Tang , Geoffrey Liu , Wei Xu , Linbo Wang

Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular and powerful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, classical approaches rely on strong assumptions such as the $\textit{exclusion criterion}$, which…

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to infer treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we study nonparametric inference with an IV under a separable binary treatment choice model, which…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Chan Park , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

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

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

This paper proposes semi-instrumental variables (semi-IVs) as an alternative to instrumental variables (IVs) to identify the causal effect of a binary (or discrete) endogenous treatment. A semi-IV is a less restrictive form of instrument:…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-23 Christophe Bruneel-Zupanc

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Jing Zou , Wei Li , Wei Lin

This paper studies the confounding effects from the unmeasured confounders and the imbalance of observed confounders in IV regression and aims at unbiased causal effect estimation. Recently, nonlinear IV estimators were proposed to allow…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Bo Li , Fei Wu

Researchers often use instrumental variables (IV) models to investigate the causal relationship between an endogenous variable and an outcome while controlling for covariates. When an exogenous variable is unavailable to serve as the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-18 Moses Stewart

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Instrumental variables are a popular study design for the estimation of treatment effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. In the canonical instrumental variables design, the instrument is a binary variable. In many settings,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-10 Prabrisha Rakshit , Alexander Levis , Luke Keele