Related papers: Falsification before Extrapolation in Causal Effec…
Doubly robust estimators of causal effects are a popular means of estimating causal effects. Such estimators combine an estimate of the conditional mean of the outcome given treatment and confounders (the so-called outcome regression) with…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating causal effects but are often costly and difficult to scale; consequently, they are frequently augmented with auxiliary external controls in many applications. Prior…
The paper reviews methods that seek to draw causal inference from observational data and demonstrates how they can be applied to empirical problems in engineering research. It presents a framework for causal identification based on the…
Previous work on causal inference has primarily focused on averages and conditional averages of treatment effects, with significantly less attention on variability and uncertainty in individual treatment responses. In this paper, we…
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…
Regression adjustments are often considered by investigators to improve the estimation efficiency of causal effect in randomized experiments when there exists many pre-experiment covariates. In this paper, we provide conditions that…
The widely used 'Counterfactual' definition of Causal Effects was derived for unbiasedness and accuracy - and not generalizability. We propose a Combinatorial definition for the External Validity (EV) of intervention effects. We first…
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…
Many popular methods for building confidence intervals on causal effects under high-dimensional confounding require strong "ultra-sparsity" assumptions that may be difficult to validate in practice. To alleviate this difficulty, we here…
We propose a formal model for counterfactual estimation with unobserved confounding in "data-rich" settings, i.e., where there are a large number of units and a large number of measurements per unit. Our model provides a bridge between the…
For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…
Empirical researchers often use diagnostic checks to assess the plausibility of their modeling assumptions, such as testing for covariate balance in RCTs, pre-trends in event studies, or instrument validity in IV designs. While these checks…
Knowing the effect of an intervention is critical for human decision-making, but current approaches for causal effect estimation rely on manual data collection and structuring, regardless of the causal assumptions. This increases both the…
Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Although complete randomization is widely regarded as the gold standard for causal inference, covariate imbalance can still arise by chance in finite samples. Rerandomization has emerged as an effective tool to improve covariate balance…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, yet they are often underpowered for detecting effect heterogeneity. Large observational studies (OS) can supplement RCTs for…
Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation--particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail…
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…
Causal inference in a program evaluation setting faces the problem of external validity when the treatment effect in the target population is different from the treatment effect identified from the population of which the sample is…