Related papers: Nested Counterfactual Identification from Arbitrar…
Unobserved confounding is a major hurdle for causal inference from observational data. Confounders---the variables that affect both the causes and the outcome---induce spurious non-causal correlations between the two. Wang & Blei (2018)…
It is commonly believed that, in a real-world environment, samples can only be drawn from observational and interventional distributions, corresponding to Layers 1 and 2 of the Pearl Causal Hierarchy. Layer 3, representing counterfactual…
Interpretability research takes counterfactual theories of causality for granted. Most causal methods rely on counterfactual interventions to inputs or the activations of particular model components, followed by observations of the change…
A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…
AI-driven outcomes can be challenging for end-users to understand. Explanations can address two key questions: "Why this outcome?" (factual) and "Why not another?" (counterfactual). While substantial efforts have been made to formalize…
Counterfactual inference aims to answer retrospective "what if" questions and thus belongs to the most fine-grained type of inference in Pearl's causality ladder. Existing methods for counterfactual inference with continuous outcomes aim at…
We provide an optimization-based framework to perform counterfactual analysis in a dynamic model with hidden states. Our framework is grounded in the ``abduction, action, and prediction'' approach to answer counterfactual queries and…
The capacity to address counterfactual "what if" inquiries is crucial for understanding and making use of causal influences. Traditional counterfactual inference, under Pearls' counterfactual framework, typically depends on having access to…
We consider after-study statistical inference for sequentially designed experiments wherein multiple units are assigned treatments for multiple time points using treatment policies that adapt over time. Our goal is to provide inference…
We consider causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. We study the case where a proxy is available for the unobserved confounding in the form of a network connecting the units. For example, the link structure of a social…
We address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding, a setting where both treatment assignment and observed outcomes of individuals may be influenced by their neighbors within a…
Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…
There has been a growing interest in model-agnostic methods that can make deep learning models more transparent and explainable to a user. Some researchers recently argued that for a machine to achieve a certain degree of human-level…
Two fundamental requirements for the deployment of machine learning models in safety-critical systems are to be able to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data correctly and to be able to explain the prediction of the model. Although…
Counterfactuals and counterfactual reasoning underpin numerous techniques for auditing and understanding artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The traditional paradigm for counterfactual reasoning in this literature is the interventional…
Referred to as the third rung of the causal inference ladder, counterfactual queries typically ask the "What if ?" question retrospectively. The standard approach to estimate counterfactuals resides in using a structural equation model that…
Data-driven methods that detect anomalies in times series data are ubiquitous in practice, but they are in general unable to provide helpful explanations for the predictions they make. In this work we propose a model-agnostic algorithm that…
Counterfactual reasoning, a hallmark of intelligence, consists of three steps: inferring latent variables from observations (abduction), constructing alternatives (interventions), and predicting their outcomes (prediction). This skill is…
Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…
Counterfactual inference is a useful tool for comparing outcomes of interventions on complex systems. It requires us to represent the system in form of a structural causal model, complete with a causal diagram, probabilistic assumptions on…