Related papers: Detecting hidden confounding in observational data…
Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer",…
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…
We study a model where one target variable Y is correlated with a vector X:=(X_1,...,X_d) of predictor variables being potential causes of Y. We describe a method that infers to what extent the statistical dependences between X and Y are…
Causal inference from observational data can be viewed as a missing data problem arising from a hypothetical population-scale randomized trial matched to the observational study. This links a target trial protocol with a corresponding…
Inferring the causal effect of a non-randomly assigned exposure on an outcome requires adjusting for common causes of the exposure and outcome to avoid biased conclusions. Notwithstanding the efforts investigators routinely make to measure…
We report assumption-free bounds for any contrast between the probabilities of the potential outcome under exposure and non-exposure when the confounders are missing not at random. We assume that the missingness mechanism is…
Fairness for machine learning predictions is widely required in practice for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. Existing work typically focuses on settings without unobserved confounding, even though unobserved confounding can lead to…
Causal models with unobserved variables impose nontrivial constraints on the distributions over the observed variables. When a common cause of two variables is unobserved, it is impossible to uncover the causal relation between them without…
We generalize the proximal g-formula of Miao, Geng, and Tchetgen Tchetgen (2018) for causal inference under unobserved confounding using proxy variables. Specifically, we show that the formula holds true for all causal models in a certain…
Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings with selective labels: outcomes are observed only for units selected by past decision makers. This creates an identification problem under unobserved confounding -- when…
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…
Observed associations in a database may be due in whole or part to variations in unrecorded (latent) variables. Identifying such variables and their causal relationships with one another is a principal goal in many scientific and practical…
We consider testing whether a set of Gaussian variables, selected from the data, is independent of the remaining variables. We assume that this set is selected via a very simple approach that is commonly used across scientific disciplines:…
The common cause principle for two random variables $A$ and $B$ is examined in the case of causal insufficiency, when their common cause $C$ is known to exist, but only the joint probability of $A$ and $B$ is observed. As a result, $C$…
Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data…
The lack of non-parametric statistical tests for confounding bias significantly hampers the development of robust, valid and generalizable predictive models in many fields of research. Here I propose the partial and full confounder tests,…
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…
Causal additive models provide a tractable yet expressive framework for causal discovery in the presence of hidden variables. When unobserved backdoor or causal paths exist between two variables, their causal relationship is often…
Data analyses typically rely upon assumptions about missingness mechanisms that lead to observed versus missing data. When the data are missing not at random, direct assumptions about the missingness mechanism, and indirect assumptions…
Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…