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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

This chapter covers different approaches to policy evaluation for assessing the causal effect of a treatment or intervention on an outcome of interest. As an introduction to causal inference, the discussion starts with the experimental…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-10-03 Martin Huber

Bipartite experiments arise in various fields, in which the treatments are randomized over one set of units, while the outcomes are measured over another separate set of units. However, existing methods often rely on strong model…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-16 Sizhu Lu , Lei Shi , Yue Fang , Wenxin Zhang , Peng Ding

Causal inference, as a major research area in statistics and data science, plays a central role across diverse fields such as medicine, economics, education, and the social sciences. Design-based causal inference begins with randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-01 Xin Lu , Wanjia Fu , Hongzi Li , Haoyang Yu , Honghao Zhang , Ke Zhu , Hanzhong Liu

A fundamental challenge in the empirical sciences involves uncovering causal structure through observation and experimentation. Causal discovery entails linking the conditional independence (CI) invariances in observational data to their…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-04 Zihan Zhou , Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Murat Kocaoglu

Estimating treatment effects from observational data is challenging due to two main reasons: (a) hidden confounding, and (b) covariate mismatch (control and treatment groups not having identical distributions). Long lines of works exist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Praharsh Nanavati , Ranjitha Prasad , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

The notion of causal effect is fundamental across many scientific disciplines. Traditionally, quantitative researchers have studied causal effects at the level of variables; for example, how a certain drug dose (W) causally affects a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-07 Junhyung Park , Yuqing Zhou

Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer",…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-25 Vidushi Adlakha , Eric Kuo

While probabilistic models describe the dependence structure between observed variables, causal models go one step further: they predict, for example, how cognitive functions are affected by external interventions that perturb neuronal…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-04-12 Sebastian Weichwald , Jonas Peters

Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke

Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-10 Liuyi Yao , Zhixuan Chu , Sheng Li , Yaliang Li , Jing Gao , Aidong Zhang

In many fields of scientific research and real-world applications, unbiased estimation of causal effects from non-experimental data is crucial for understanding the mechanism underlying the data and for decision-making on effective…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Sound educational policy recommendations require valid estimates of causal effects, but observational studies in physics education research sometimes have loosely specified causal hypotheses. The connections between the observational data…

Physics Education · Physics 2021-09-22 M. B. Weissman

We consider estimation of a total causal effect from observational data via covariate adjustment. Ideally, adjustment sets are selected based on a given causal graph, reflecting knowledge of the underlying causal structure. Valid adjustment…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-23 Janine Witte , Leonard Henckel , Marloes H. Maathuis , Vanessa Didelez

Covariate adjustment is one method of causal effect identification in non-experimental settings. Prior research provides routes for finding appropriate adjustments sets, but much of this research assumes knowledge of the underlying causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-04 Sara LaPlante , Sofia Triantafillou , Emilija Perković

Identifying variables responsible for changes to a biological system enables applications in drug target discovery and cell engineering. Given a pair of observational and interventional datasets, the goal is to isolate the subset of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Menghua Wu , Umesh Padia , Sean H. Murphy , Regina Barzilay , Tommi Jaakkola

Propensity score plays a central role in causal inference, but its use is not limited to causal comparisons. As a covariate balancing tool, propensity score can be used for controlled descriptive comparisons between groups whose memberships…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-09 Fan Li , Fan Li

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan

Causal inference starts with a simple idea: compare groups that differ by treatment, not much else. Traditionally, similar groups are constructed using only observed covariates; however, it remains a long-standing challenge to incorporate…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-21 Ying Jin , José Zubizarreta

Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-24 Maximilian Ilse , Patrick Forré , Max Welling , Joris M. Mooij