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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

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

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

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are becoming increasingly popular as they seem to offer the only viable way to overcome the problem of unobserved confounding in observational studies. However, some attention has to be paid to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-03 Vanessa Didelez , Sha Meng , Nuala A. Sheehan

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

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

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

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

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

This paper examines the identification power of instrumental variables (IVs) for average treatment effect (ATE) in partially identified models. We decompose the ATE identification gains into components of contributions driven by IV…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-09-07 Lina Zhang , David T. Frazier , D. S. Poskitt , Xueyan Zhao

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

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

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

In observational studies, instrumental variable (IV) methods are commonly applied when there exists some unmeasured covariates. In Mendelian Randomization (MR), constructing an allele score by using many single nucleotide polymorphisms…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-22 Shunichiro Orihara

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to study the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome in the presence of unmeasured confounding. IVs require an instrument, a variable that is (A1) associated with the exposure, (A2) has no…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-30 Hyunseung Kang , Zijian Guo , Zhonghua Liu , Dylan Small

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

Instrumental variable (IV) analyses are becoming common in health services research and epidemiology. Most IV analyses use naturally occurring instruments, such as distance to a hospital. In these analyses, investigators must assume the…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-04 Zach Branson , Luke Keele

Estimating causal effects from observational data is challenging, especially in the presence of latent confounders. Much work has been done on addressing this challenge, but most of the existing research ignores the bias introduced by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Yang Xie , Ziqi Xu , Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Yinghao Zhang , Zaiwen Feng

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

The technique of data augmentation (DA) is often used in machine learning for regularization purposes to better generalize under i.i.d. settings. In this work, we present a unifying framework with topics in causal inference to make a case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Uzair Akbar , Niki Kilbertus , Hao Shen , Krikamol Muandet , Bo Dai