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One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Thuc Duy Le , Jixue Liu

Inferring the heterogeneous treatment effect is a fundamental problem in the sciences and commercial applications. In this paper, we focus on estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE), that is, the difference in the conditional…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-23 Haomiao Meng , Xingye Qiao

This paper studies the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from observational data, in the presence of unobserved confounders. The two-stage least square (TSLS) method and its variants with a standard instrumental variable (IV)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Motivated by applications in precision medicine and treatment effect heterogeneity, recent research has focused on estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) using machine learning (ML). CATE estimates may represent…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-30 Oliver J. Hines , Karla Diaz-Ordaz , Stijn Vansteelandt

We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from observational data with unobserved confounders. The CATE function maps baseline covariates to individual causal effect predictions and is key for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-09 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Angela Zhou

An important aspect of the performance of algorithms that predict individualized treatment effects (ITE) is moderate calibration, i.e., the average treatment effect among individuals with predicted treatment effect of z being equal to z.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-10 Mohsen Sadatsafavi , Jeroen Hoogland , Thomas P. A. Debray , John Petkau

Instrumental variable (IV) methods mitigate bias from unobserved confounding in observational causal inference but rely on the availability of a valid instrument, which can often be difficult or infeasible to identify in practice. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-08 Frances Dean , Jenna Fields , Radhika Bhalerao , Marie Charpignon , Ahmed Alaa

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

For observational studies, we study the sensitivity of causal inference when treatment assignments may depend on unobserved confounders. We develop a loss minimization approach for estimating bounds on the conditional average treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-11 Steve Yadlowsky , Hongseok Namkoong , Sanjay Basu , John Duchi , Lu Tian

Reliable estimation of treatment effects from observational data is important in many disciplines such as medicine. However, estimation is challenging when unconfoundedness as a standard assumption in the causal inference literature is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jonas Schweisthal , Dennis Frauen , Maresa Schröder , Konstantin Hess , Niki Kilbertus , Stefan Feuerriegel

Instrumental variable methods provide a powerful approach to estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. But a key challenge when applying them is the reliance on untestable "exclusion" assumptions that rule out any…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-23 Jason Hartford , Victor Veitch , Dhanya Sridhar , Kevin Leyton-Brown

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects is important to tailor treatments to those individuals who would most likely benefit. However, conditional average treatment effect predictors may often be trained on one population but possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Christoph Kern , Michael Kim , Angela Zhou

Instrumental variables (IVs) are often continuous, arising in diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Existing approaches for continuous IVs typically impose strong parametric models or assume homogeneous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Mei Dong , Lin Liu , Dingke Tang , Geoffrey Liu , Wei Xu , Linbo Wang

This paper studies the confounding effects from the unmeasured confounders and the imbalance of observed confounders in IV regression and aims at unbiased causal effect estimation. Recently, nonlinear IV estimators were proposed to allow…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Bo Li , Fei Wu

Robust estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is a fundamental challenge for optimal decision-making in domains ranging from personalized medicine to educational policy. In recent years, predictive machine learning has emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-23 Maximilian Schuessler , Erik Sverdrup , Robert Tibshirani

In recent years, precision treatment strategy have gained significant attention in medical research, particularly for patient care. We propose a novel framework for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) in time-to-event…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-29 Runjia Li , Victor B. Talisa , Chung-Chou H. Chang

Heterogeneous effect estimation plays a crucial role in causal inference, with applications across medicine and social science. Many methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) have been proposed in recent years,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-08-22 Edward H. Kennedy

We introduce the Multiplicative Quasi-Instrumental Variable (MQIV) model, a framework for causal inference with unmeasured confounding that leverages an instrument that may be imperfectly exogenous. We allow the candidate quasi-instrument…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-13 Jiewen Liu , Chan Park , David Richardson , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

We are in the middle of a remarkable rise in the use and capability of artificial intelligence. Much of this growth has been fueled by the success of deep learning architectures: models that map from observables to outputs via multiple…

Applications · Statistics 2017-01-02 Jason Hartford , Greg Lewis , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Matt Taddy

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects from non-randomized data. A canonical example is a randomized trial with noncompliance, in which the randomized treatment assignment serves as an IV for the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-06 Rui Wang , Ying-Qi Zhao , Oliver Dukes , Bo Zhang