English
Related papers

Related papers: Correcting Confounding via Random Selection of Bac…

200 papers

Causal influence measures for machine learnt classifiers shed light on the reasons behind classification, and aid in identifying influential input features and revealing their biases. However, such analyses involve evaluating the classifier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Shayak Sen , Piotr Mardziel , Anupam Datta , Matthew Fredrikson

Identifying effects of actions (treatments) on outcome variables from observational data and causal assumptions is a fundamental problem in causal inference. This identification is made difficult by the presence of confounders which can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-03-19 Ilya Shpitser , Tyler VanderWeele , James M. Robins

A recent method for causal discovery is in many cases able to infer whether X causes Y or Y causes X for just two observed variables X and Y. It is based on the observation that there exist (non-Gaussian) joint distributions P(X,Y) for…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2009-10-12 Dominik Janzing , Bastian Steudel

Causality plays a pivotal role in various fields of study. Based on the framework of causal graphical models, previous works have proposed identifying whether a variable is a cause or non-cause of a target in every Markov equivalent graph…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-16 Qingyuan Zheng , Yue Liu , Yangbo He

Proximal causal inference was recently proposed as a framework to identify causal effects from observational data in the presence of hidden confounders for which proxies are available. In this paper, we extend the proximal causal inference…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-27 AmirEmad Ghassami , Alan Yang , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Christos Louizos , Uri Shalit , Joris Mooij , David Sontag , Richard Zemel , Max Welling

It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most…

This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Sohaib Kiani , Jared Barton , Jon Sushinsky , Lynda Heimbach , Bo Luo

In the causal adjustment setting, variable selection techniques based on either the outcome or treatment allocation model can result in the omission of confounders or the inclusion of spurious variables in the propensity score. We propose a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-06-06 Ashkan Ertefaie , Masoud Asgharian , David A. Stephens

The paper provides a simple test for deciding, from a given causal diagram, whether two sets of variables have the same bias-reducing potential under adjustment. The test requires that one of the following two conditions holds: either (1)…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-03-19 Judea Pearl , Azaria Paz

In observational studies, potential unobserved confounding is a major barrier in isolating the average causal effect (ACE). In these scenarios, two main approaches are often used: confounder adjustment for causality (CAC) and instrumental…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-26 Roy S. Zawadzki , Daniel L. Gillen

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Helen Guo , Ilya Shpitser , Elizabeth L. Ogburn

When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical…

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are central to causal inference from observational data, particularly when a randomized experiment is not feasible. However, of the three conventional core IV identification conditions, only one, IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-23 Zhonghua Liu , Baoluo Sun , Ting Ye , David Richardson , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Causal interventions in language model representations have largely targeted discrete features, like grammatical number. However, language models must also make use of features that are graded. We introduce a method for causal intervention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhenghao Herbert Zhou , R. Thomas McCoy , Robert Frank

Valid causal inference in observational studies often requires controlling for confounders. However, in practice measurements of confounders may be noisy, and can lead to biased estimates of causal effects. We show that we can reduce the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Madeleine Udell

Discovering causal relations is fundamental to reasoning and intelligence. In particular, observational causal discovery algorithms estimate the cause-effect relation between two random entities $X$ and $Y$, given $n$ samples from $P(X,Y)$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-24 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Marco Baroni , David Lopez-Paz

We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Kailash Budhathoki , Mario Boley , Jilles Vreeken

We show that causal effects can be identified when there is bunching in the distribution of a continuous treatment variable, without imposing any parametric assumptions. This yields a new nonparametric method for overcoming selection bias…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-08 Carolina Caetano , Gregorio Caetano , Leonard Goff , Eric Nielsen