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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…
Instrumental variable (IV) methods are used to estimate causal effects in settings with unobserved confounding, where we cannot directly experiment on the treatment variable. Instruments are variables which only affect the outcome…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
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…
In an observational study, it is common to leverage known null effect to detect bias. One such strategy is to set aside a placebo sample -- a subset of data immune from the hypothesized cause-and-effect relationship. Existence of an effect…
Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…
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…
Simulation methods are among the most ubiquitous methodological tools in statistical science. In particular, statisticians often is simulation to explore properties of statistical functionals in models for which developed statistical theory…
Traditional approaches to data visualization have often focused on comparing different subsets of data, and this is reflected in the many techniques developed and evaluated over the years for visual comparison. Similarly, common workflows…
Applied researchers in biomedicine and related fields are often interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment or intervention. Although randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for establishing causal effects,…
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…
Natural language provides a widely accessible and expressive interface for robotic agents. To understand language in complex environments, agents must reason about the full range of language inputs and their correspondence to the world.…
Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…
Causal mediation analysis provides techniques for defining and estimating effects that may be endowed with mechanistic interpretations. With many scientific investigations seeking to address mechanistic questions, causal direct and indirect…
Vaccine randomized trials are typically designed to be blinded, ensuring that the estimated vaccine efficacy (VE) reflects the immunological effect of the vaccine. When blinding is broken, however, the estimated VE reflects not only the…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data…
Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine…
Determining and measuring cause-effect relationships is fundamental to most scientific studies of natural phenomena. The notion of causation is distinctly different from correlation which only looks at association of trends or patterns in…
A growing number of methods aim to assess the challenging question of treatment effect variation in observational studies. This special section of "Observational Studies" reports the results of a workshop conducted at the 2018 Atlantic…