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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…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Ruocheng Guo , Jundong Li , Huan Liu

Inferring the effect of interventions within complex systems is a fundamental problem of statistics. A widely studied approach employs structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-14 David Strieder , Mathias Drton

Interventional causal models describe several joint distributions over some variables used to describe a system, one for each intervention setting. They provide a formal recipe for how to move between the different joint distributions and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-06 Eigil F. Rischel , Sebastian Weichwald

Conventional methods in causal effect inferencetypically rely on specifying a valid set of control variables. When this set is unknown or misspecified, inferences will be erroneous. We propose a method for inferring average causal effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-14 Ludvig Hult , Dave Zachariah

We address the common yet often-overlooked selection bias in interventional studies, where subjects are selectively enrolled into experiments. For instance, participants in a drug trial are usually patients of the relevant disease; A/B…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Haoyue Dai , Ignavier Ng , Jianle Sun , Zeyu Tang , Gongxu Luo , Xinshuai Dong , Peter Spirtes , Kun Zhang

Discovering causal relationships from observational data is a challenging task that relies on assumptions connecting statistical quantities to graphical or algebraic causal models. In this work, we focus on widely employed assumptions for…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-20 Jonas Wahl , Urmi Ninad , Jakob Runge

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-18 Andre F. Ribeiro

Discussions on causal relations in real life often consider variables for which the definition of causality is unclear since the notion of interventions on the respective variables is obscure. Asking 'what qualifies an action for being an…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-17 Dominik Janzing , Sergio Hernan Garrido Mejia

Causal inference relies on two fundamental assumptions: ignorability and positivity. We study causal inference when the true confounder value can be expressed as a function of the observed data; we call this setting estimation with…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-18 Aahlad Puli , Adler J. Perotte , Rajesh Ranganath

We present a categorical framework for relating causal models that represent the same system at different levels of abstraction. We define a causal abstraction as natural transformations between appropriate Markov functors, which concisely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-07 Markus Englberger , Devendra Singh Dhami

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

Classical causal and statistical inference methods typically assume the observed data consists of independent realizations. However, in many applications this assumption is inappropriate due to a network of dependences between units in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Rohit Bhattacharya , Daniel Malinsky , Ilya Shpitser

Causal models communicate our assumptions about causes and effects in real-world phe- nomena. Often the interest lies in the identification of the effect of an action which means deriving an expression from the observed probability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-20 Santtu Tikka , Juha Karvanen

There has been widespread use of causal inference methods for the rigorous analysis of observational studies and to identify policy evaluations. In this article, we consider a class of generalized coarsened procedures for confounding. At a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-04 Debashis Ghosh , Lei Wang

Causal inference plays an important role in explanatory analysis and decision making across various fields like statistics, marketing, health care, and education. Its main task is to estimate treatment effects and make intervention…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-22 Yingrong Wang , Haoxuan Li , Minqin Zhu , Anpeng Wu , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu , Kun Kuang

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

Causal inference with observational data can be performed under an assumption of no unobserved confounders (unconfoundedness assumption). There is, however, seldom clear subject-matter or empirical evidence for such an assumption. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-13 Minna Genbäck , Xavier de Luna

The classical notion of causal effect identifiability is defined in terms of treatment and outcome variables. In this paper, we consider the identifiability of state-based causal effects: how an intervention on a particular state of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yizuo Chen , Adnan Darwiche

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal inference can help inferring properties of the 'unobserved joint distributions'…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-18 Dominik Janzing

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-03-19 Ilya Shpitser , Tyler VanderWeele , James M. Robins