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One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-03 Ricardo Silva , Robin Evans

We provide new results for nonparametric identification, estimation, and inference of causal effects using `proxy controls': observables that are noisy but informative proxies for unobserved confounding factors. Our analysis applies to…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-22 Ben Deaner

Most work in causal inference considers deterministic interventions that set each unit's treatment to some fixed value. However, under positivity violations these interventions can lead to non-identification, inefficiency, and effects with…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-20 Edward H. Kennedy

We study the identification of causal effects, motivated by two improvements to identifiability which can be attained if one knows that some variables in a causal graph are functionally determined by their parents (without needing to know…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Yizuo Chen , Adnan Darwiche

Instrumental variable methods are widely used in medical and social science research to draw causal conclusions when the treatment and outcome are confounded by unmeasured confounding variables. One important feature of such studies is that…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-25 Bo Zhang , Siyu Heng , Emily J. MacKay , Ting Ye

Instrumental variable models allow us to identify a causal function between covariates $X$ and a response $Y$, even in the presence of unobserved confounding. Most of the existing estimators assume that the error term in the response $Y$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-23 Sorawit Saengkyongam , Leonard Henckel , Niklas Pfister , Jonas Peters

Survey questions often ask respondents to select from ordered scales where the meanings of the categories are subjective, leaving each individual free to apply their own definitions in answering. This paper studies the use of these…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-01-29 Leonard Goff

Causal inference is widely used in various fields, such as biology, psychology and economics, etc. In observational studies, we need to balance the covariates before estimating causal effect. This study extends the one-dimensional entropy…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-19 Juan Chen , Yingchun Zhou

Applied researchers in biomedicine and related fields are often interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment or intervention. Although randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for establishing causal effects,…

Purpose of Review: Negative controls are a powerful tool to detect and adjust for bias in epidemiological research. This paper introduces negative controls to a broader audience and provides guidance on principled design and causal analysis…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-20 Xu Shi , Wang Miao , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

We address the problem of causal effect estimation in the presence of hidden confounders using nonparametric instrumental variable (IV) regression. An established approach is to use estimators based on learned spectral features, that is,…

Recently, there has been a surge in methodological development for the difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to evaluate causal effects. Standard methods in the literature rely on the parallel trends assumption to identify the average…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-17 Pan Zhao , Yifan Cui

Instrumental variables (IV) are often used to identify causal effects in observational settings and experiments subject to non-compliance. Under canonical assumptions, IVs allow us to identify a so-called local average treatment effect…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-03 Luca Locher , Mats J. Stensrud , Aaron L. Sarvet

Indirect experiments provide a valuable framework for estimating treatment effects in situations where conducting randomized control trials (RCTs) is impractical or unethical. Unlike RCTs, indirect experiments estimate treatment effects by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Emma Brunskill

We consider the problem of estimating causal effects of interventions from observational data when well-known back-door and front-door adjustments are not applicable. We show that when an identifiable causal effect is subject to an implicit…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-13 Jouni Helske , Santtu Tikka , Juha Karvanen

Many policy evaluations using instrumental variable (IV) methods include individuals who interact with each other, potentially violating the standard IV assumptions. This paper defines and partially identifies direct and spillover effects…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-17 Didier Nibbering , Matthijs Oosterveen

Data scarcity is a tremendous challenge in causal effect estimation. In this paper, we propose to exploit additional data sources to facilitate estimating causal effects in the target population. Specifically, we leverage additional source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Thanh Vinh Vo , Pengfei Wei , Trong Nghia Hoang , Tze-Yun Leong

In panel experiments, we randomly assign units to different interventions, measuring their outcomes, and repeating the procedure in several periods. Using the potential outcomes framework, we define finite population dynamic causal effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-28 Iavor Bojinov , Ashesh Rambachan , Neil Shephard

Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs in the observational study is crucial but challenging, due to the presence of unmeasured confounding. While previous methods employed the negative controls to adjust for the confounding…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-21 Yong Wu , Yanwei Fu , Shouyan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Xinwei Sun

Causal effect estimation has been studied by many researchers when only observational data is available. Sound and complete algorithms have been developed for pointwise estimation of identifiable causal queries. For non-identifiable causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Ziwei Jiang , Lai Wei , Murat Kocaoglu