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Predicting which action (treatment) will lead to a better outcome is a central task in decision support systems. To build a prediction model in real situations, learning from biased observational data is a critical issue due to the lack of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-11 Akira Tanimoto , Tomoya Sakai , Takashi Takenouchi , Hisashi Kashima

Many scientific questions in biomedical, environmental, and psychological research involve understanding the effects of multiple factors on outcomes. While factorial experiments are ideal for this purpose, randomized controlled treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-03 Ruoqi Yu , Peng Ding

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

Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Joseph B. Bak-Coleman , Stephan Lewandowsky , Philipp Lorenz-Spreen , Arvind Narayanan , Amy Orben , Lisa Oswald

Classical causal and statistical inference methods typically assume the observed data consists of independent realizations. However, in many applications this assumption is inappropriate due to a network of dependences between units in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Rohit Bhattacharya , Daniel Malinsky , Ilya Shpitser

To conduct causal inference in observational settings, researchers must rely on certain identifying assumptions. In practice, these assumptions are unlikely to hold exactly. This paper considers the bias of selection-on-observables,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-26 Melody Huang , Cory McCartan

We study identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment variable on a long-term outcome using data from an observational and an experimental domain. The observational data are subject to unobserved confounding. Furthermore,…

Randomized controlled trials generate experimental variation that can credibly identify causal effects, but often suffer from limited scale, while observational datasets are large, but often violate desired identification assumptions. To…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-27 George Z. Gui

Two-sided marketplace platforms often run experiments to test the effect of an intervention before launching it platform-wide. A typical approach is to randomize individuals into the treatment group, which receives the intervention, and the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-27 Hannah Li , Geng Zhao , Ramesh Johari , Gabriel Y. Weintraub

This paper discusses the fundamental principles of causal inference - the area of statistics that estimates the effect of specific occurrences, treatments, interventions, and exposures on a given outcome from experimental and observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-03 Francesca Dominici , Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi , Fabrizia Mealli

We study causal inference under case-control and case-population sampling. Specifically, we focus on the binary-outcome and binary-treatment case, where the parameters of interest are causal relative and attributable risks defined via the…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-10-24 Sung Jae Jun , Sokbae Lee

Randomized experiments on a network often involve interference between connected units; i.e., a situation in which an individual's treatment can affect the response of another individual. Current approaches to deal with interference, in…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-17 Guillaume Basse , Edoardo Airoldi

Undertaking causal inference with observational data is incredibly useful across a wide range of tasks including the development of medical treatments, advertisements and marketing, and policy making. There are two significant challenges…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-19 Matthew James Vowels , Necati Cihan Camgoz , Richard Bowden

This study demonstrates the existence of a testable condition for the identification of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data, which relies on two sets of variables: observed covariates to be controlled for…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

Combining observational and experimental data for causal inference can improve treatment effect estimation. However, many observational data sets cannot be released due to data privacy considerations, so one researcher may not have access…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-26 Charlotte Z. Mann , Adam C. Sales , Johann A. Gagnon-Bartsch

The era of big data has witnessed an increasing availability of observational data from mobile and social networking, online advertising, web mining, healthcare, education, public policy, marketing campaigns, and so on, which facilitates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Zhixuan Chu , Ruopeng Li , Stephen Rathbun , Sheng Li

Understanding causality should be a core requirement of any attempt to build real impact through AI. Due to the inherent unobservability of counterfactuals, large randomised trials (RCTs) are the standard for causal inference. But large…

We propose a new method to estimate causal effects from nonexperimental data. Each pair of sample units is first associated with a stochastic 'treatment' - differences in factors between units - and an effect - a resultant outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-08 Andre F. Ribeiro , Frank Neffke , Ricardo Hausmann

How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-13 Jiawei Fu , Donald P. Green

Objective: The growing availability of large-scale observational clinical datasets and challenges in conducting randomized controlled trials have spurred enthusiasm in using causal machine learning (ML) for causal inference in observational…