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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)…
Causal discovery from observational data is an important tool in many branches of science. Under certain assumptions it allows scientists to explain phenomena, predict, and make decisions. In the large sample limit, sound and complete…
One of the fundamental challenges found throughout the data sciences is to explain why things happen in specific ways, or through which mechanisms a certain variable $X$ exerts influences over another variable $Y$. In statistics and machine…
Estimating causal queries, such as changes in protein abundance in response to a perturbation, is a fundamental task in the analysis of biomolecular pathways. The estimation requires experimental measurements on the pathway components.…
Understanding causal relationships among the variables of a system is paramount to explain and control its behavior. For many real-world systems, however, the true causal graph is not readily available and one must resort to predictions…
Causal inference is capable of estimating the treatment effect (i.e., the causal effect of treatment on the outcome) to benefit the decision making in various domains. One fundamental challenge in this research is that the treatment…
Causal mediation analysis is complicated with multiple effect definitions that require different sets of assumptions for identification. This paper provides a systematic explanation of such assumptions. We define five potential outcome…
Comparing two samples of data, we observe a change in the distribution of an outcome variable. In the presence of multiple explanatory variables, how much of the change can be explained by each possible cause? We develop a new estimation…
We study the identification of causal effects, motivated by two improvements to identifiability which can be attained if one knows that some variables in a causal graph are functionally determined by their parents (without needing to know…
The do-calculus was developed in 1995 to facilitate the identification of causal effects in non-parametric models. The completeness proofs of [Huang and Valtorta, 2006] and [Shpitser and Pearl, 2006] and the graphical criteria of [Tian and…
Causal graphs are widely used in software engineering to document and explore causal relationships. Though widely used, they may also be wildly misleading. Causal structures generated from SE data can be highly variable. This instability is…
Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…
Causal inference methods for observational data are increasingly recognized as a valuable complement to randomized clinical trials (RCTs). They can, under strong assumptions, emulate RCTs or help refine their focus. Our approach to causal…
While observational data are routinely used to estimate causal effects of biomedical treatments, doing so requires special methods to adjust for observed confounding. These methods invariably rely on untestable statistical and causal…
We study causal effect estimation in a setting where the data are not i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed). We focus on exchangeable data satisfying an assumption of independent causal mechanisms. Traditional causal effect…
The subject of this paper is the elucidation of effects of actions from causal assumptions represented as a directed graph, and statistical knowledge given as a probability distribution. In particular, we are interested in predicting…
Causal discovery aims to automatically uncover causal relationships from data, a capability with significant potential across many scientific disciplines. However, its real-world applications remain limited. Current methods often rely on…
Causal world models are systems that can answer counterfactual questions about an environment of interest, i.e. predict how it would have evolved if an arbitrary subset of events had been realized differently. It requires understanding the…
Bayesian modeling provides a principled approach to quantifying uncertainty in model parameters and model structure and has seen a surge of applications in recent years. Within the context of a Bayesian workflow, we are concerned with model…
Identifying and controlling bias is a key problem in empirical sciences. Causal diagram theory provides graphical criteria for deciding whether and how causal effects can be identified from observed (nonexperimental) data by covariate…