Related papers: The Balancing Act in Causal Inference
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…
How should researchers adjust for covariates? We show that if the propensity score is estimated using a specific covariate balancing approach, inverse probability weighting (IPW), augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW), and inverse…
Statistical causal inference from observational studies often requires adjustment for a possibly multi-dimensional variable, where dimension reduction is crucial. The propensity score, first introduced by Rosenbaum and Rubin, is a popular…
Studying causal effects of continuous treatments is important for gaining a deeper understanding of many interventions, policies, or medications, yet researchers are often left with observational studies for doing so. In the observational…
Estimating average causal effect (ACE) is useful whenever we want to know the effect of an intervention on a given outcome. In the absence of a randomized experiment, many methods such as stratification and inverse propensity weighting have…
Weighting methods are essential tools for estimating causal effects in observational studies, with the goal of balancing pre-treatment covariates across treatment groups. Traditional approaches pursue this objective indirectly, for example,…
Observational studies are often used to understand relationships between exposures and outcomes. They do not, however, allow conclusions about causal relationships to be drawn unless statistical techniques are used to account for the…
Causal inference is crucial for understanding the true impact of interventions, policies, or actions, enabling informed decision-making and providing insights into the underlying mechanisms that shape our world. In this paper, we establish…
Estimating causal effects from observational data is challenging due to selection bias, which leads to imbalanced covariate distributions across treatment groups. Propensity score-based weighting methods are widely used to address this…
Collaboration between different data centers is often challenged by heterogeneity across sites. To account for the heterogeneity, the state-of-the-art method is to re-weight the covariate distributions in each site to match the distribution…
Propensity scores are often used for stratification of treatment and control groups of subjects in observational data to remove confounding bias when estimating of causal effect of the treatment on an outcome in so-called potential outcome…
Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for measuring causal effects. However, they are often not always feasible, and causal treatment effects must be estimated from observational data. Observational studies do not allow robust…
In causal inference confounding may be controlled either through regression adjustment in an outcome model, or through propensity score adjustment or inverse probability of treatment weighting, or both. The latter approaches, which are…
This paper develops methods for estimating the natural direct and indirect effects in causal mediation analysis. The efficient influence function-based estimator (EIF-based estimator) and the inverse probability weighting estimator (IPW…
Existing weighting methods for treatment effect estimation are often built upon the idea of propensity scores or covariate balance. They usually impose strong assumptions on treatment assignment or outcome model to obtain unbiased…
This paper proposes a~simple, yet powerful, method for balancing distributions of covariates for causal inference based on observational studies. The method makes it possible to balance an arbitrary number of quantiles (e.g., medians,…
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…
A key challenge in estimating causal effects from observational data is handling confounding and is commonly achieved through weighting methods that balance distribution of covariates between treatment and control groups. Weighting…
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…
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…