Related papers: Testing the identification of causal effects in ob…
We consider continuous-time survival or more general event-history settings, where the aim is to infer the causal effect of a time-dependent treatment process. This is formalised as the effect on the outcome event of a (possibly…
For settings with a binary treatment and a binary outcome, instrumental variables can be used to construct bounds on a causal treatment effect. With continuous outcomes, meaningful bounds are more difficult to obtain because the domain of…
Inferring causal relations from experimental observations is of primal importance in science. Instrumental tests provide an essential tool for that aim, as they allow one to estimate causal dependencies even in the presence of unobserved…
The estimation of causal effects using quasiexperiments often relies on the use of unusual or serendipitous sources of exogenous variation. When the goal is estimating the same causal effects across many different settings, the same unusual…
A major challenge in estimating treatment effects in observational studies is the reliance on untestable conditions such as the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can falsify the assumption…
The possibility of unmeasured confounding is one of the main limitations for causal inference from observational studies. There are different methods for (partially) empirically assessing the plausibility of unconfoundedness. However, most…
Instrumental variables are widely used in econometrics and epidemiology for identifying and estimating causal effects when an exposure of interest is confounded by unmeasured factors. Despite this popularity, the assumptions invoked to…
Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…
Measuring treatment effects in observational studies is challenging because of confounding bias. Confounding occurs when a variable affects both the treatment and the outcome. Traditional methods such as propensity score matching estimate…
In social science researches, causal inference regarding peer effects often faces significant challenges due to homophily bias and contextual confounding. For example, unmeasured health conditions (e.g., influenza) and psychological states…
This paper concerns the probabilistic evaluation of the effects of actions in the presence of unmeasured variables. We show that the identification of causal effect between a singleton variable X and a set of variables Y can be accomplished…
Instrumental variable methods provide useful tools for inferring causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To apply these methods with large-scale data sets, a major challenge is to find valid instruments from a possibly…
Epidemiologists and applied statisticians often believe that relative effect measures conditional on covariates, such as risk ratios and mean ratios, are ``transportable'' across populations. Here, we examine the identification of causal…
In prior work we have introduced an asymptotic threshold of sufficient randomness for causal inference from observational data. In this paper we extend that prior work in three main ways. First, we show how to empirically estimate a lower…
Randomized trials typically estimate average relative treatment effects, but decisions on the benefit of a treatment are possibly better informed by more individualized predictions of the absolute treatment effect. In case of a binary…
A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariate strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism…
Although review papers on causal inference methods are now available, there is a lack of introductory overviews on what they can render and on the guiding criteria for choosing one particular method. This tutorial gives an overview in…
Instrumental variables are commonly used to estimate effects of a treatment afflicted by unmeasured confounding, and in practice instruments are often continuous (e.g., measures of distance, or treatment preference). However, available…
Algorithms for constraint-based causal discovery select graphical causal models among a space of possible candidates (e.g., all directed acyclic graphs) by executing a sequence of conditional independence tests. These may be used to inform…
In observational studies, causal inference relies on several key identifying assumptions. One identifiability condition is the positivity assumption, which requires the probability of treatment be bounded away from 0 and 1. That is, for…