Related papers: When can relative risks provide causal estimates?
What is the ideal regression (if any) for estimating average causal effects? We study this question in the setting of discrete covariates, deriving expressions for the finite-sample variance of various stratification estimators. This…
We study the estimation of causal parameters when not all confounders are observed and instead negative controls are available. Recent work has shown how these can enable identification and efficient estimation via two so-called bridge…
We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…
Predicting the effect of interventions with many possible variations, e.g., therapeutic content that affects mental health outcomes or an earnings call transcript that drives movement in share price, is useful across several domains.…
The health effects of environmental exposures have been studied for decades, typically using standard regression models to assess exposure-outcome associations found in observational non-experimental data. We propose and illustrate a…
In causal inference, an important problem is to quantify the effects of interventions or treatments. Many studies focus on estimating the mean causal effects; however, these estimands may offer limited insight since two distributions can…
Causal inference methods (instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, etc.) are primary tools used across many social science milieus. One area where their application has lagged however, is in the study of…
The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…
In this paper, we propose a robust method to estimate the average treatment effects in observational studies when the number of potential confounders is possibly much greater than the sample size. We first use a class of penalized…
A structural causal model is made of endogenous (manifest) and exogenous (latent) variables. We show that endogenous observations induce linear constraints on the probabilities of the exogenous variables. This allows to exactly map a causal…
The hazard function is central to the formulation of commonly used survival regression models such as the proportional hazards and accelerated failure time models. However, these models rely on a shared baseline hazard, which, when…
Interference arises when an individual's potential outcome depends on the individual treatment level, but also on the treatment level of others. A common assumption in the causal inference literature in the presence of interference is…
Area-specific causal inference is important in many policy and survey applications, where the goal is to evaluate treatment effects for small geographic or demographic domains. Existing causal small area estimation methods, however,…
In settings where interference between units is possible, we define the prevalence of indirect effects to be the number of units who are affected by the treatment of others. This quantity does not fully identify an indirect effect, but may…
If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal inference can help inferring properties of the 'unobserved joint distributions'…
The proportional hazards assumption in the commonly used Cox model for censored failure time data is often violated in scientific studies. Yang and Prentice (2005) proposed a novel semiparametric two-sample model that includes the…
Researchers are often interested in analyzing conditional treatment effects. One variant of this is "causal moderation," which implies that intervention upon a third (moderator) variable would alter the treatment effect. This study…
Time-to-event analyses are often plagued by both -- possibly unmeasured -- confounding and competing risks. To deal with the former, the use of instrumental variables for effect estimation is rapidly gaining ground. We show how to make use…
Observational studies of causal effects require adjustment for confounding factors. In the tabular setting, where these factors are well-defined, separate random variables, the effect of confounding is well understood. However, in public…
This article introduces a new condition based on odds ratios for sensitivity analysis. The analysis involves the average effect of a treatment or exposure on a response or outcome with estimates adjusted for and conditional on a single,…