Related papers: Causal Inference Struggles with Agency on Online P…
Analysts often make visual causal inferences about possible data-generating models. However, visual analytics (VA) software tends to leave these models implicit in the mind of the analyst, which casts doubt on the statistical validity of…
In experiments that study social phenomena, such as peer influence or herd immunity, the treatment of one unit may influence the outcomes of others. Such "interference between units" violates traditional approaches for causal inference, so…
Researchers often face data fusion problems, where multiple data sources are available, each capturing a distinct subset of variables. While problem formulations typically take the data as given, in practice, data acquisition can be an…
Randomized A/B tests within online learning platforms represent an exciting direction in learning sciences. With minimal assumptions, they allow causal effect estimation without confounding bias and exact statistical inference even in small…
We consider a causal inference problem frequently encountered in online advertising systems, where a publisher (e.g., Instagram, TikTok) interacts repeatedly with human users and advertisers by sporadically displaying to each user an…
A fundamental question for companies with large amount of logged data is: How to use such logged data together with incoming streaming data to make good decisions? Many companies currently make decisions via online A/B tests, but wrong…
This paper presents a randomization-based framework for estimating causal effects under interference between units, motivated by challenges that arise in analyzing experiments on social networks. The framework integrates three components:…
Causal effect estimation from observational data is a challenging problem, especially with high dimensional data and in the presence of unobserved variables. The available data-driven methods for tackling the problem either provide an…
Observational studies are valuable for estimating the effects of various medical interventions, but are notoriously difficult to evaluate because the methods used in observational studies require many untestable assumptions. This lack of…
Causal inference from observational data can be viewed as a missing data problem arising from a hypothetical population-scale randomized trial matched to the observational study. This links a target trial protocol with a corresponding…
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…
This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of *interference* between…
When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical…
While many areas of machine learning have benefited from the increasing availability of large and varied datasets, the benefit to causal inference has been limited given the strong assumptions needed to ensure identifiability of causal…
Online experiments such as Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) or A/B-tests are the bread and butter of modern platforms on the web. They are conducted continuously to allow platforms to estimate the causal effect of replacing system…
Online reinforcement learning and other adaptive sampling algorithms are increasingly used in digital intervention experiments to optimize treatment delivery for users over time. In this work, we focus on longitudinal user data collected by…
Clinical trials usually target average treatment effects, but treatment decisions are made for individuals. This tension motivates a common criticism of evidence-based medicine: a treatment that is beneficial on average may be inappropriate…
When estimating treatment effects, the golden standard is to conduct a randomized experiment and then contrast outcomes associated with the treatment group and the control group. However, in many cases, randomized experiments are either…
To draw scientifically meaningful conclusions and build reliable models of quantitative phenomena, cause and effect must be taken into consideration (either implicitly or explicitly). This is particularly challenging when the measurements…
We study causal inference in randomized experiments (or quasi-experiments) following a $2\times 2$ factorial design. There are two treatments, denoted $A$ and $B$, and units are randomly assigned to one of four categories: treatment $A$…