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Instrumental variables allow for quantification of cause and effect relationships even in the absence of interventions. To achieve this, a number of causal assumptions must be met, the most important of which is the independence assumption,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-05 Nikolai Miklin , Mariami Gachechiladze , George Moreno , Rafael Chaves

Instrumental variables are widely used to deal with unmeasured confounding in observational studies and imperfect randomized controlled trials. In these studies, researchers often target the so-called local average treatment effect as it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-24 Linbo Wang , Yuexia Zhang , Thomas S. Richardson , James M. Robins

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

Learning causal relationships between pairs of complex traits from observational studies is of great interest across various scientific domains. However, most existing methods assume the absence of unmeasured confounding and restrict causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-17 Wei Li , Rui Duan , Sai Li

Conventional methods in causal effect inferencetypically rely on specifying a valid set of control variables. When this set is unknown or misspecified, inferences will be erroneous. We propose a method for inferring average causal effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-14 Ludvig Hult , Dave Zachariah

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

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-05 Edward H. Kennedy , Scott A. Lorch , Dylan S. Small

Instrumental variable methods are widely used to address unmeasured confounding, yet much of the existing literature has focused on the binary instrument setting. Extensions to continuous instruments often impose strong parametric…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-12 Zhenghao Zeng , Alexander W. Levis , JungHo Lee , Edward H. Kennedy , Luke Keele

Instrumental variable methods can identify causal effects even when the treatment and outcome are confounded. We study the problem of imperfect measurements of the binary instrumental variable, treatment or outcome. We first consider…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-06 Zhichao Jiang , Peng Ding

Unmeasured confounding is a threat to causal inference in observational studies. In recent years, use of negative controls to mitigate unmeasured confounding has gained increasing recognition and popularity. Negative controls have a…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-05 Xu Shi , Wang Miao , Jennifer C. Nelson , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

This paper develops an empirical balancing approach for the estimation of treatment effects under two-sided noncompliance using a binary conditionally independent instrumental variable. The method weighs both treatment and outcome…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-07-10 Phillip Heiler

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

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Under the standard IV model, however, the average treatment effect (ATE) is only partially identifiable. To address this,…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-08 Linbo Wang , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

The instrumental variable model of Imbens and Angrist (1994) and Angrist et al. (1996) allow for the identification of the local average treatment effect, also known as the complier average causal effect. However, many empirical studies are…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-12 Shuozhi Zuo , Peng Ding , Fan Yang

Assessing causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is challenging. Although auxiliary variables, such as instrumental variables, are commonly used to identify causal effects, they are often unavailable in practice due to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Kang Shuai , Shanshan Luo , Yue Zhang , Feng Xie , Yangbo He

The instrumental variable method consistently estimates the effect of a treatment when there is unmeasured confounding and a valid instrumental variable. A valid instrumental variable is a variable that is independent of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-02-03 Zijian Guo , Dylan Small

Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-01-17 Peng Ding , Tyler VanderWeele , James Robins

The instrumental variable method is a prominent approach to recover under certain conditions, valid inference about a treatment causal effect even when unmeasured confounding might be present. In a groundbreaking paper, Imbens and Angrist…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-13 Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen

Instrumental variable methods are among the most commonly used causal inference approaches to deal with unmeasured confounders in observational studies. The presence of invalid instruments is the primary concern for practical applications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-18 Zijian Guo

Inference for causal effects can benefit from the availability of an instrumental variable (IV) which, by definition, is associated with the given exposure, but not with the outcome of interest other than through a causal exposure effect.…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-01-13 Stijn Vansteelandt , Jack Bowden , Manoochehr Babanezhad , Els Goetghebeur