Related papers: The Effect of Omitted Variables on the Sign of Reg…
Omitted variables are one of the most important threats to the identification of causal effects. Several widely used methods assess the impact of omitted variables on empirical conclusions by comparing measures of selection on observables…
Despite their impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks, modern language models remain susceptible to distribution shifts, exhibiting brittle behavior when evaluated on data that differs in distribution from their training data. In…
We study conditions under which the addition of variables to a regression equation can turn a previously statistically insignificant result into a significant one. Specifically, we characterize the minimum strength of association required…
Omitted variable bias occurs when a statistical model leaves out variables that are relevant determinants of the effects under study. This results in the model attributing the missing variables' effect to some of the included variables --…
Omitted variable bias can affect treatment effect estimates obtained from observational data due to the lack of random assignment to treatment groups. Sensitivity analyses adjust these estimates to quantify the impact of potential omitted…
This paper studies the robustness of estimated policy effects to changes in the distribution of covariates, a key determinant of the external validity of (quasi)-experimental results. I propose a novel robustness metric $\delta^*$ which…
Managers, employers, policymakers, and others often seek to understand whether decisions are biased against certain groups. One popular analytic strategy is to estimate disparities after adjusting for observed covariates, typically with a…
Over the past years, the crucial role of data has largely been shadowed by the field's focus on architectures and training procedures. We often cause changes to the data without being aware of their wider implications. In this paper we show…
The reliability of machine learning systems critically assumes that the associations between features and labels remain similar between training and test distributions. However, unmeasured variables, such as confounders, break this…
Covariate adjustment can improve precision in analyzing randomized experiments. With fully observed data, regression adjustment and propensity score weighting are asymptotically equivalent in improving efficiency over unadjusted analysis.…
We study the out-of-sample properties of robust empirical optimization problems with smooth $\phi$-divergence penalties and smooth concave objective functions, and develop a theory for data-driven calibration of the non-negative "robustness…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) yield internally valid causal effect estimates, but generalizing these results to target populations with different characteristics requires an untestable selection ignorability assumption: conditional on…
Distance covariance is a popular measure of dependence between random variables. It has some robustness properties, but not all. We prove that the influence function of the usual distance covariance is bounded, but that its breakdown value…
This paper introduces tools for assessing the sensitivity, to unobserved confounding, of a common estimator of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome that employs weights: the weighted linear regression of the outcome on the…
The robustness of classifiers has become a question of paramount importance in the past few years. Indeed, it has been shown that state-of-the-art deep learning architectures can easily be fooled with imperceptible changes to their inputs.…
Classical semiparametric inference with missing outcome data is not robust to contamination of the observed data and a single observation can have arbitrarily large influence on estimation of a parameter of interest. This sensitivity is…
In many applications of regression discontinuity designs, the running variable used by the administrator to assign treatment is only observed with error. We show that, provided the observed running variable (i) correctly classifies the…
Individual-specific, time-constant, random effects are often used to model dependence and/or to account for omitted covariates in regression models for longitudinal responses. Longitudinal studies have known a huge and widespread use in the…
We develop a framework for quantifying omitted variable bias (OVB) in nonlinear instrumental variable (IV) estimators, including the local average treatment effect (LATE), the LATE for the treated (LATT), and the partially linear IV model…
We consider the problem of robustly testing the norm of a high-dimensional sparse signal vector under two different observation models. In the first model, we are given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution…