Related papers: Estimating Causal Effects Under Image Confounding …
Observational studies require adjustment for confounding factors that are correlated with both the treatment and outcome. In the setting where the observed variables are tabular quantities such as average income in a neighborhood, tools…
Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both…
Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…
Poverty maps derived from satellite imagery are increasingly used to inform high-stakes policy decisions, such as the allocation of humanitarian aid and the distribution of government resources. Such poverty maps are typically constructed…
Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…
Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…
Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…
Identifying effects of actions (treatments) on outcome variables from observational data and causal assumptions is a fundamental problem in causal inference. This identification is made difficult by the presence of confounders which can be…
Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…
The discovery of discriminatory bias in human or automated decision making is a task of increasing importance and difficulty, exacerbated by the pervasive use of machine learning and data mining. Currently, discrimination discovery largely…
We propose a method to distinguish causal influence from hidden confounding in the following scenario: given a target variable Y, potential causal drivers X, and a large number of background features, we propose a novel criterion for…
Causal graphs may inform covariate adjustment for estimating causal effects and improve estimation efficiency by exploiting the graphical structure. In many applications, however, the target causal parameter may not be point-identified due…
A key condition for obtaining reliable estimates of the causal effect of a treatment is overlap (a.k.a. positivity): the distributions of the features used to perform causal adjustment cannot be too different in the treated and control…
In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…
Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…
Causal approaches to fairness have seen substantial recent interest, both from the machine learning community and from wider parties interested in ethical prediction algorithms. In no small part, this has been due to the fact that causal…
Earth observation (EO) data such as satellite imagery can have far-reaching impacts on our understanding of the geography of poverty, especially when coupled with machine learning (ML) and computer vision. Early research used computer…
Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to…
Visual representations underlie object recognition tasks, but they often contain both robust and non-robust features. Our main observation is that image classifiers may perform poorly on out-of-distribution samples because spurious…
The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…