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Estimating individual level treatment effects (ITE) from observational data is a challenging and important area in causal machine learning and is commonly considered in diverse mission-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Sungyub Kim , Yongsu Baek , Sung Ju Hwang , Eunho Yang

This paper develops a Bayesian framework for robust causal inference from longitudinal observational data. Many contemporary methods rely on structural assumptions, such as factor models, to adjust for unobserved confounding, but they can…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-20 Angelos Alexopoulos , Nikolaos Demiris

Instrumental variable methods provide a powerful approach to estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. But a key challenge when applying them is the reliance on untestable "exclusion" assumptions that rule out any…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-23 Jason Hartford , Victor Veitch , Dhanya Sridhar , Kevin Leyton-Brown

We address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding, a setting where both treatment assignment and observed outcomes of individuals may be influenced by their neighbors within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Abhishek Dalvi , Neil Ashtekar , Vasant Honavar

In this work, we propose Cell Variational Information Bottleneck Network (cellVIB), a convolutional neural network using information bottleneck mechanism, which can be combined with the latest feedforward network architecture in an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Zhonghua Zhai , Chen Ju , Jinsong Lan , Shuai Xiao

Estimating an individual's counterfactual outcomes under interventions is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, facial images) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Yulun Wu , Louie McConnell , Claudia Iriondo

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-26 Elisabeth Ailer , Jason Hartford , Niki Kilbertus

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

The inference of causal relationships using observational data from partially observed multivariate systems with hidden variables is a fundamental question in many scientific domains. Methods extracting causal information from conditional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-13 Daniel Chicharro , Michel Besserve , Stefano Panzeri

The fundamental challenge of drawing causal inference is that counterfactual outcomes are not fully observed for any unit. Furthermore, in observational studies, treatment assignment is likely to be confounded. Many statistical methods have…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-01 Harsh Parikh , Carlos Varjao , Louise Xu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-31 Dustin Tran , Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Susan Athey , David M. Blei

This work extends causal inference with stochastic confounders. We propose a new approach to variational estimation for causal inference based on a representer theorem with a random input space. We estimate causal effects involving latent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-26 Thanh Vinh Vo , Pengfei Wei , Wicher Bergsma , Tze-Yun Leong

Estimating an individual's potential outcomes under counterfactual treatments is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, impulse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-13 Yulun Wu , Layne C. Price , Zichen Wang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Robert A. Barton , George Karypis

We address the problem of inferring the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome across space, using observational data. The data is possibly subject to unmeasured confounding variables which, in a standard approach, must be adjusted for…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-04 Muhammad Osama , Dave Zachariah , Thomas B. Schön

Causal inference plays an important role in explanatory analysis and decision making across various fields like statistics, marketing, health care, and education. Its main task is to estimate treatment effects and make intervention…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-22 Yingrong Wang , Haoxuan Li , Minqin Zhu , Anpeng Wu , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu , Kun Kuang

Causal treatment effect estimation is a key problem that arises in a variety of real-world settings, from personalized medicine to governmental policy making. There has been a flurry of recent work in machine learning on estimating causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Niki Kilbertus , Matt J. Kusner , Ricardo Silva

Causal effect estimation from observational data is fundamental across various applications. However, selecting an appropriate estimator from dozens of specialized methods demands substantial manual effort and domain expertise. We present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Vahid Balazadeh , Hamidreza Kamkari , Valentin Thomas , Benson Li , Junwei Ma , Jesse C. Cresswell , Rahul G. Krishnan

An important problem in econometrics and marketing is to infer the causal impact that a designed market intervention has exerted on an outcome metric over time. This paper proposes to infer causal impact on the basis of a…

Applications · Statistics 2015-06-02 Kay H. Brodersen , Fabian Gallusser , Jim Koehler , Nicolas Remy , Steven L. Scott

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,…

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan