English
Related papers

Related papers: Fighting Noise with Noise: Causal Inference with M…

200 papers

Instrumental variables regression is a tool that is commonly used in the analysis of observational data. The instrumental variables are used to make causal inference about the effect of a certain exposure in the presence of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-07 Valentin Vancak , Arvid Sjölander

Certain causal models involving unmeasured variables induce no independence constraints among the observed variables but imply, nevertheless, inequality contraints on the observed distribution. This paper derives a general formula for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Judea Pearl

We consider the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from purely observational data in the bi-directional Mendelian randomization (MR), where some invalid instruments, as well as unmeasured confounding, usually exist. To address…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-15 Feng Xie , Zhen Yao , Lin Xie , Yan Zeng , Zhi Geng

Studies investigating the causal effects of spatially varying exposures on outcomes often rely on observational and spatially indexed data. A prevalent challenge is unmeasured spatial confounding, where an unobserved spatially varying…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-19 Sophie M. Woodward , Mauricio Tec , Francesca Dominici

In a causal graphical model, an instrument for a variable X and its effect Y is a random variable that is a cause of X and independent of all the causes of Y except X. (Pearl (1995), Spirtes et al (2000)). Instrumental variables can be used…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-01-14 Tianjiao Chu , Richard Scheines , Peter L. Spirtes

Software systems with large parameter spaces, nondeterminism and high computational cost are challenging to test. Recently, software testing techniques based on causal inference have been successfully applied to systems that exhibit such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Michael Foster , Robert M. Hierons , Donghwan Shin , Neil Walkinshaw , Christopher Wild

With nonignorable nonresponse, an effective method to construct valid estimators of population parameters is to use a covariate vector called instrument that can be excluded from the nonresponse propensity but are still useful covariate…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Ji Chen , Jun Shao

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a widely-used method to estimate the causal relationship between a risk factor and disease. A fundamental part of any MR analysis is to choose appropriate genetic variants as instrumental variables.…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-26 Ashish Patel , Francis J. DiTraglia , Verena Zuber , Stephen Burgess

Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular and powerful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, classical approaches rely on strong assumptions such as the $\textit{exclusion criterion}$, which…

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a popular method in genetic epidemiology to estimate the effect of an exposure on an outcome by using genetic instruments. These instruments are often selected from a combination of prior knowledge from…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-12 Nan Bi , Hyunseung Kang , Jonathan Taylor

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

Unmeasured confounding is a key threat to reliable causal inference based on observational studies. Motivated from two powerful natural experiment devices, the instrumental variables and difference-in-differences, we propose a new method…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-09 Ting Ye , Ashkan Ertefaie , James Flory , Sean Hennessy , Dylan S. Small

Inferring causal relationships from observational data is often challenging due to endogeneity. This paper provides new identification results for causal effects of discrete, ordered and continuous treatments using multiple binary…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-10-21 Nadja van 't Hoff

This paper considers inference in a linear instrumental variable regression model with many potentially weak instruments, in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. I first show that existing test procedures, including those that…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-04-24 Luther Yap

We consider two variables that are related to each other by an invertible function. While it has previously been shown that the dependence structure of the noise can provide hints to determine which of the two variables is the cause, we…

Recent work on dynamic interventions has greatly expanded the range of causal questions researchers can study while weakening identifying assumptions and yielding effects that are more practically relevant. However, most work in dynamic…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-10 Jacqueline A Mauro , Edward H Kennedy , Daniel Nagin

Instrumental variable analysis is a widely used method to estimate causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. When the instruments, exposure and outcome are not measured in the same sample, Angrist and Krueger (1992)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-09-07 Qingyuan Zhao , Jingshu Wang , Jack Bowden , Dylan S. Small

Instrumental variables have proven useful, in particular within the social sciences and economics, for making inference about the causal effect of a random variable, B, on another random variable, C, in the presence of unobserved…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-06-26 Roland R. Ramsahai

This paper develops a general causal inference method for treatment effects models with noisily measured confounders. The key feature is that a large set of noisy measurements are linked with the underlying latent confounders through an…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-10-14 Yingjie Feng

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Jing Zou , Wei Li , Wei Lin