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Related papers: Optimal transport weights for causal inference

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Covariate balancing is a popular technique for controlling confounding in observational studies. It finds weights for the treatment group which are close to uniform, but make the group's covariate means (approximately) equal to those of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-07 Shiva Kaul , Min-Gyu Kim

We propose a Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) approach to causal inference using observational data consisting of outcome, treatment, and a set of confounders. The conditional distribution of the outcome given treatment and confounders is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-01 Yongseok Hur , Joonhyuk Jung , Juhee Lee

Recent research in causal inference has made important progress in addressing challenges to the external validity of trial findings. Such methods weight trial participant data to more closely resemble the distribution of effect-modifying…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-18 Justin M. Clark , Kollin W. Rott , James S. Hodges , Jared D. Huling

Reweighting a distribution to minimize a distance to a target distribution is a powerful and flexible strategy for estimating a wide range of causal effects, but can be challenging in practice because optimal weights typically depend on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-16 Oscar Clivio , Avi Feller , Chris Holmes

In observational studies, weighting methods that directly optimize the balance between treatment and covariates have received much attention lately; however these have mainly focused on binary treatments. Inspired by domain adaptation, we…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-02-27 Guillaume Martinet

The idea of covariate balance is at the core of causal inference. Inverse propensity weights play a central role because they are the unique set of weights that balance the covariate distributions of different treatment groups. We discuss…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-29 Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller , David A. Hirshberg , José R. Zubizarreta

Many causal parameters depend on a moment of the joint distribution of potential outcomes. Such parameters are especially relevant in policy evaluation settings, where noncompliance is common and accommodated through the model of Imbens &…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-17 Daniel Ober-Reynolds

We study the problem of observational causal inference with continuous treatments in the framework of inverse propensity-score weighting. To obtain stable weights, we design a new algorithm based on entropy balancing that learns weights to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Mohammad Taha Bahadori , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen , David E. Heckerman

Generalization methods offer a powerful solution to one of the key drawbacks of randomized controlled trials (RCTs): their limited representativeness. By enabling the transport of treatment effect estimates to target populations subject to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-20 Ahmed Boughdiri , Clément Berenfeld , Julie Josse , Erwan Scornet

Standard causal inference characterizes treatment effect through averages, but the counterfactual distributions could be different in not only the central tendency but also spread and shape. To provide a comprehensive evaluation of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-04 Steven G. Xu , Shu Yang , Brian J. Reich

In observational studies, balancing covariates in different treatment groups is essential to estimate treatment effects. One of the most commonly used methods for such purposes is weighting. The performance of this class of methods usually…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-07 Ruoqi Yu , Shulei Wang

When estimating causal effects, it is important to assess external validity, i.e., determine how useful a given study is to inform a practical question for a specific target population. One challenge is that the covariate distribution in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Zhenghao Zeng , Edward H. Kennedy , Lisa M. Bodnar , Ashley I. Naimi

Causal estimands can vary significantly depending on the relationship between outcomes in treatment and control groups, potentially leading to wide partial identification (PI) intervals that impede decision making. Incorporating covariates…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-02 Sirui Lin , Zijun Gao , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

We study the estimation of causal estimand involving the joint distribution of treatment and control outcomes for a single unit. In typical causal inference settings, it is impossible to observe both outcomes simultaneously, which places…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-16 Sirui Lin , Zijun Gao , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

A common goal in observational research is to estimate marginal causal effects in the presence of confounding variables. One solution to this problem is to use the covariate distribution to weight the outcomes such that the data appear…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-18 Kevin P. Josey , Elizabeth Juarez-Colunga , Fan Yang , Debashis Ghosh

Positivity violations, which occur when some subgroups either always or never receive a treatment of interest, pose significant challenges for causal effect estimation with observational data. Recent balancing weight methods have proved to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-17 Martha Barnard , Jared D. Huling , Julian Wolfson

Complementary features of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies (OSs) can be used jointly to estimate the average treatment effect of a target population. We propose a calibration weighting estimator that enforces…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-16 Dasom Lee , Shu Yang , Lin Dong , Xiaofei Wang , Donglin Zeng , Jianwen Cai

Ordinal outcomes are common in clinical settings where they often represent increasing levels of disease progression or different levels of functional impairment. Such outcomes can characterize differences in meaningful patient health…

Given samples from two joint distributions, we consider the problem of Optimal Transportation (OT) between them when conditioned on a common variable. We focus on the general setting where the conditioned variable may be continuous, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Piyushi Manupriya , Rachit Keerti Das , Sayantan Biswas , Saketha Nath Jagarlapudi

The treatment allocation mechanism in a randomized clinical trial can be optimized by maximizing the nonparametric efficiency bound for a specific measure of treatment effect. Optimal treatment allocations which may or may not depend on…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-23 Wei Zhang , Zhiwei Zhang , Aiyi Liu