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We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-07 Jose M. Peña

Learning causality from observational data has received increasing interest across various scientific fields. However, most existing methods assume the absence of latent confounders and restrict the underlying causal graph to be acyclic,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-18 Wei Jin , Lang Lang , Amanda B. Spence , Leah H. Rubin , Yanxun Xu

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-26 Nick Huntington-Klein

The process of diagnosis involves learning about the state of a system from various observations of symptoms or findings about the system. Sophisticated Bayesian (and other) algorithms have been developed to revise and maintain beliefs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-01 Mark Alan Peot , Ross D. Shachter

Most existing works on disentangled representation learning are solely built upon an marginal independence assumption: all factors in disentangled representations should be statistically independent. This assumption is necessary but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Xiaojiang Yang , Wendong Bi , Yitong Sun , Yu Cheng , Junchi Yan

Estimating the effect of intervention from observational data while accounting for confounding variables is a key task in causal inference. Oftentimes, the confounders are unobserved, but we have access to large amounts of additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Shachi Deshpande , Kaiwen Wang , Dhruv Sreenivas , Zheng Li , Volodymyr Kuleshov

We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Kailash Budhathoki , Mario Boley , Jilles Vreeken

We study the data-driven selection of causal graphical models using constraint-based algorithms, which determine the existence or non-existence of edges (causal connections) in a graph based on testing a series of conditional independence…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-29 Daniel Malinsky

We consider the problem of causal discovery (structure learning) from heterogeneous observational data. Most existing methods assume a homogeneous sampling scheme, which leads to misleading conclusions when violated in many applications. To…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-01 Fangting Zhou , Kejun He , Yang Ni

(This comment has been updated to respond to Wang and Blei's rejoinder [arXiv:1910.07320].) The premise of the deconfounder method proposed in "Blessings of Multiple Causes" by Wang and Blei [arXiv:1805.06826], namely that a variable that…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-18 Elizabeth L. Ogburn , Ilya Shpitser , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

While observational data are routinely used to estimate causal effects of biomedical treatments, doing so requires special methods to adjust for observed confounding. These methods invariably rely on untestable statistical and causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-02 Arman Oganisian

Understanding causal relationships between variables is fundamental across scientific disciplines. Most causal discovery algorithms rely on two key assumptions: (i) all variables are observed, and (ii) the underlying causal graph is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Muralikrishnna G. Sethuraman , Faramarz Fekri

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental obstacle to establishing valid causal conclusions from observational data. Two complementary types of approaches have been developed to address this obstacle: obtaining identification using fortuitous…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-27 Ilya Shpitser , Zach Wood-Doughty , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Given only observational data $X = g(Z)$, where both the latent variables $Z$ and the generating process $g$ are unknown, recovering $Z$ is ill-posed without additional assumptions. Existing methods often assume linearity or rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yujia Zheng , Zijian Li , Shunxing Fan , Andrew Gordon Wilson , Kun Zhang

Although randomized experiments are widely regarded as the gold standard for estimating causal effects, missing data of the pretreatment covariates makes it challenging to estimate the subgroup causal effects. When the missing data…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-01-08 Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

Causal discovery aims to learn causal relationships between variables from targeted data, making it a fundamental task in machine learning. However, causal discovery algorithms often rely on unverifiable causal assumptions, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Huiyang Yi , Yanyan He , Duxin Chen , Mingyu Kang , He Wang , Wenwu Yu

A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Wenhao Zhang , Ramin Ramezani , Arash Naeim

In this paper we study covariance estimation with missing data. We consider missing data mechanisms that can be independent of the data, or have a time varying dependency. Additionally, observed variables may have arbitrary (non uniform)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-17 Eduardo Pavez , Antonio Ortega

Given a response $Y$ and a vector $X = (X^1, \dots, X^d)$ of $d$ predictors, we investigate the problem of inferring direct causes of $Y$ among the vector $X$. Models for $Y$ that use all of its causal covariates as predictors enjoy the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-12 Rune Christiansen , Jonas Peters