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This paper studies the cumulative causal effects of sequential treatments in the presence of unmeasured confounders. It is a critical issue in sequential decision-making scenarios where treatment decisions and outcomes dynamically evolve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Yingrong Wang , Anpeng Wu , Baohong Li , Ziyang Xiao , Ruoxuan Xiong , Qing Han , Kun Kuang

The identification theory for causal effects in directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with hidden variables is well established, but methods for estimating and inferring functionals that extend beyond the g-formula remain underdeveloped. Previous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-12 Anna Guo , Razieh Nabi

Hidden confounders that influence both states and actions can bias policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL), leading to suboptimal or non-generalizable behavior. Most RL algorithms ignore this issue, learning policies from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Thanh Vinh Vo , Young Lee , Haozhe Ma , Chien Lu , Tze-Yun Leong

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

Unobserved confounding is one of the greatest challenges for causal discovery. The case in which unobserved variables have a widespread effect on many of the observed ones is particularly difficult because most pairs of variables are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Jing Zou , Wei Li , Wei Lin

Observational studies are the primary source of data for causal inference, but it is challenging when existing unmeasured confounding. Missing data problems are also common in observational studies. How to obtain the causal effects from the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-15 Renzhong Zheng

Querying causal effects from time-series data is important across various fields, including healthcare, economics, climate science, and epidemiology. However, this task becomes complex in the existence of time-varying latent confounders,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Thuc duy Le , Xudong Guo , Shichao Zhang

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Helen Guo , Ilya Shpitser , Elizabeth L. Ogburn

This paper addresses the problem of estimating causal effects when adjustment variables in the back-door or front-door criterion are partially observed. For such scenarios, we derive bounds on the causal effects by solving two non-linear…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-24 Ang Li , Judea Pearl

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

Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-30 Shunichiro Orihara , Shinpei Imori , Kosuke Morikawa , Atsushi Goto , Masataka Taguri

Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs in the observational study is crucial but challenging, due to the presence of unmeasured confounding. While previous methods employed the negative controls to adjust for the confounding…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-21 Yong Wu , Yanwei Fu , Shouyan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Xinwei Sun

An important problem in causal inference is to break down the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into different causal pathways and to quantify the causal effect in each pathway. For instance, in causal fairness, the total effect of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-10 Lu Cheng , Ruocheng Guo , Huan Liu

Estimating causal effects from observational data (at either an individual -- or a population -- level) is critical for making many types of decisions. One approach to address this task is to learn decomposed representations of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Negar Hassanpour , Russell Greiner

The problem of fair classification can be mollified if we develop a method to remove the embedded sensitive information from the classification features. This line of separating the sensitive information is developed through the causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Hyemi Kim , Seungjae Shin , JoonHo Jang , Kyungwoo Song , Weonyoung Joo , Wanmo Kang , Il-Chul Moon

We consider the problem of estimating a causal effect in a multi-domain setting. The causal effect of interest is confounded by an unobserved confounder and can change between the different domains. We assume that we have access to a proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Manuel Iglesias-Alonso , Felix Schur , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas Peters

Confounder selection, namely choosing a set of covariates to control for confounding between a treatment and an outcome, is arguably the most important step in the design of an observational study. Previous methods, such as Pearl's…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-24 F. Richard Guo , Qingyuan Zhao

We propose a method to distinguish causal influence from hidden confounding in the following scenario: given a target variable Y, potential causal drivers X, and a large number of background features, we propose a novel criterion for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-07 You-Lin Chen , Lenon Minorics , Dominik Janzing

In this paper, we discuss causal inference on the efficacy of a treatment or medication on a time-to-event outcome with competing risks. Although the treatment group can be randomized, there can be confoundings between the compliance and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-06 Cheng Zheng , Ran Dai , Parameswaran Hari , Mei-Jie Zhang