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Standard instrumental variables (IV) methods identify a Local Average Treatment Effect under monotonicity, which rules out defiers. In many empirical environments, however, distinct instruments may induce heterogeneous and even opposing…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-16 Johann Caro-Burnett

A popular way to estimate the causal effect of a variable x on y from observational data is to use an instrumental variable (IV): a third variable z that affects y only through x. The more strongly z is associated with x, the more reliable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Zhaobin Kuang , Frederic Sala , Nimit Sohoni , Sen Wu , Aldo Córdova-Palomera , Jared Dunnmon , James Priest , Christopher Ré

Instrumental variable (IV) strategies are widely used in political science to establish causal relationships. However, the identifying assumptions required by an IV design are demanding, and it remains challenging for researchers to assess…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-08 Apoorva Lal , Mac Lockhart , Yiqing Xu , Ziwen Zu

The study of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured spatially varying confounders has garnered increasing attention. However, a general framework for identifiability, which is critical for reliable causal inference from observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Tommy Tang , Xinran Li , Bo Li

Instrumental variable (IV) methods mitigate bias from unobserved confounding in observational causal inference but rely on the availability of a valid instrument, which can often be difficult or infeasible to identify in practice. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-08 Frances Dean , Jenna Fields , Radhika Bhalerao , Marie Charpignon , Ahmed Alaa

Instrumental variable (IV) regression is a standard strategy for learning causal relationships between confounded treatment and outcome variables from observational data by utilizing an instrumental variable, which affects the outcome only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Liyuan Xu , Yutian Chen , Siddarth Srinivasan , Nando de Freitas , Arnaud Doucet , Arthur Gretton

This paper studies the cumulative causal effects of sequential treatments in the presence of unmeasured confounders. It is a critical issue in sequential decision-making scenarios where treatment decisions and outcomes dynamically evolve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Yingrong Wang , Anpeng Wu , Baohong Li , Ziyang Xiao , Ruoxuan Xiong , Qing Han , Kun Kuang

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

Instrumental variable methods are often used for parameter estimation in the presence of confounding. They can also be applied in stochastic processes. Instrumental variable analysis exploits moment equations to obtain estimators for causal…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-02-22 Søren Wengel Mogensen

Instrumental variables (IV) are a useful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. IV methods are well developed for uncensored outcomes, particularly for structural linear equation models, where simple…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-01 Behzad Kianian , Jung In Kim , Jason P. Fine , Limin Peng

Instrumental variables are commonly used to estimate effects of a treatment afflicted by unmeasured confounding, and in practice instruments are often continuous (e.g., measures of distance, or treatment preference). However, available…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-05 Edward H. Kennedy , Scott A. Lorch , Dylan S. Small

Can instrumental variables be found from data? While instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to identify causal effect, testing their validity from observed data remains a challenge. This is because validity of an IV depends on…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-05 Amit Sharma

Instrumental variable methods are popular choices in combating unmeasured confounding to obtain less biased effect estimates. However, we demonstrate that alternative methods may give less biased estimates depending on the nature of…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-05-21 Yun Li , Yoonseok Lee , Friedrich K Port , Bruce M Robinson

Exogenous heterogeneity, for example, in the form of instrumental variables can help us learn a system's underlying causal structure and predict the outcome of unseen intervention experiments. In this paper, we consider linear models in…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-21 Niklas Pfister , Jonas Peters

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects from non-randomized data. A canonical example is a randomized trial with noncompliance, in which the randomized treatment assignment serves as an IV for the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-06 Rui Wang , Ying-Qi Zhao , Oliver Dukes , Bo Zhang

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Felix Schur , Niklas Pfister , Peng Ding , Sach Mukherjee , Jonas Peters

Querying causal effects from time-series data is important across various fields, including healthcare, economics, climate science, and epidemiology. However, this task becomes complex in the existence of time-varying latent confounders,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Thuc duy Le , Xudong Guo , Shichao Zhang

In observational studies, treatments are typically not randomized and therefore estimated treatment effects may be subject to confounding bias. The instrumental variable (IV) design plays the role of a quasi-experimental handle since the IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-30 Lan Liu , Wang Miao , Baoluo Sun , James Robins , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Instrumental variables have been widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. Existing confidence intervals for causal effects based on instrumental variables assume that all of the putative instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-03 Hyunseung Kang , Youjin Lee , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

Traditional instrumental variable (IV) estimators face a fundamental constraint: they can only accommodate as many endogenous treatment variables as available instruments. This limitation becomes particularly challenging in settings where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shiangyi Lin , Hui Lan , Vasilis Syrgkanis