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Observational studies provide invaluable opportunities to draw causal inference, but they may suffer from biases due to pretreatment difference between treated and control units. Matching is a popular approach to reduce observed covariate…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Xinran Li

This paper deals with the problem of evaluating the causal effect using observational data in the presence of an unobserved exposure/ outcome variable, when cause-effect relationships between variables can be described as a directed acyclic…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-06-18 Manabu Kuroki , Zhihong Cai

In this paper, we develop new methods for estimating average treatment effects in observational studies, focusing on settings with more than two treatment levels under unconfoundedness given pre-treatment variables. We emphasize…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-11 Shu Yang , Guido W. Imbens , Zhanglin Cui , Douglas Faries , Zbigniew Kadziola

The propensity score is a common tool for estimating the causal effect of a binary treatment in observational data. In this setting, matching, subclassification, imputation, or inverse probability weighting on the propensity score can…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-03 Michael J Lopez , Roee Gutman

Clinical trials traditionally employ blinding as a design mechanism to reduce the influence of placebo effects. In practice, however, it can be difficult or impossible to blind study participants and unblinded trials are common in medical…

Applications · Statistics 2016-06-22 Elias Chaibub Neto

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Aytijhya Saha , Stephen Bates , Devavrat Shah

Existing metrics in competing risks survival analysis such as concordance and accuracy do not evaluate a model's ability to jointly predict the event type and the event time. To address these limitations, we propose a new metric, which we…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-08-20 Kartik Ahuja , Mihaela van der Schaar

In observational studies, the causal effect of a treatment may be confounded with variables that are related to both the treatment and the outcome of interest. In order to identify a causal effect, such studies often rely on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-17 Emma Persson , Jenny Häggström , Ingeborg Waernbaum , Xavier de Luna

A common goal in comparative effectiveness research is to estimate treatment effects on pre-specified subpopulations of patients. Though widely used in medical research, causal inference methods for such subgroup analysis remain…

Unmeasured confounding presents a significant challenge in causal inference from observational studies. Classical approaches often rely on collecting proxy variables, such as instrumental variables. However, in applications where the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-16 Xiaochuan Shi , Dehan Kong , Linbo Wang

Assessing causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding is a challenging problem. Existing studies leveraged proxy variables or multiple treatments to adjust for the confounding bias. In particular, the latter approach attributes…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-17 Yong Wu , Mingzhou Liu , Jing Yan , Yanwei Fu , Shouyan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Xinwei Sun

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-10 Carrie A. Hosman , Ben B. Hansen , Paul W. Holland

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…

Applications · Statistics 2008-11-12 Donald B. Rubin

A very common task in data visualization is to plot many data points with some measured y-value as a function of fixed x-values. Uncertainties on the y-values are typically presented as vertical error bars that represent either a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-05 Lukas Koch

In causal inference, it is common to estimate the causal effect of a single treatment variable on an outcome. However, practitioners may also be interested in the effect of simultaneous interventions on multiple covariates of a fixed target…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-24 Jaime Roquero Gimenez , Dominik Rothenhäusler

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-26 Jiajing Zheng , Jiaxi Wu , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Background: The E-value has become widely used for assessing robustness to unmeasured confounding in observational studies, but the original framework was developed for single time-point exposure-outcome settings. This study extends the…

Applications · Statistics 2026-03-02 Md. Niamul Islam Sium

Intercurrent events, such as treatment switching, rescue medication, dropout, or truncation by death, frequently complicate intention-to-treat analyses in randomized clinical trials. Existing causal inference frameworks typically target…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-12 Georgi Baklicharov , Kelly Van Lancker , Stijn Vansteelandt

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

In observational studies of treatment effects, matched samples are created so treated and control groups are similar in terms of observable covariates. Traditionally such matched samples consist of matched pairs. If a pair match fails to…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-10-22 Luke Keele , Sam Pimentel , Frank Yoon