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The problem of using observed correlations to infer causal relations is relevant to a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Yet given correlations between just two classical variables, it is impossible to determine whether they arose from…

In social sciences and economics, causal inference traditionally focuses on assessing the impact of predefined treatments (or interventions) on predefined outcomes, such as the effect of education programs on earnings. Causal discovery, in…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-12 Martin Huber

Researchers are often challenged with assessing the impact of an intervention on an outcome of interest in situations where the intervention is non-randomised, the intervention is only applied to one or few units, the intervention is…

Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu

Causal inference in observational studies can be challenging when confounders are subject to missingness. Generally, the identification of causal effects is not guaranteed even under restrictive parametric model assumptions when confounders…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-23 Jian Sun , Bo Fu

Inferring causal effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to treatment. Observational studies in infectious disease research present the additional challenge that one participant's treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-25 Brian G. Barkley , Michael G. Hudgens , John D. Clemens , Mohammad Ali , Michael E. Emch

Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-04 Rajesh Ranganath , Adler Perotte

Causal inference, as a major research area in statistics and data science, plays a central role across diverse fields such as medicine, economics, education, and the social sciences. Design-based causal inference begins with randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-01 Xin Lu , Wanjia Fu , Hongzi Li , Haoyang Yu , Honghao Zhang , Ke Zhu , Hanzhong Liu

Although review papers on causal inference methods are now available, there is a lack of introductory overviews on what they can render and on the guiding criteria for choosing one particular method. This tutorial gives an overview in…

Much of our experiments are designed to uncover the cause(s) and effect(s) behind a data generating mechanism (i.e., phenomenon) we happen to be interested in. Uncovering such relationships allows us to identify the true working of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 M. Z. Naser

This paper discusses the problem of causal query in observational data with hidden variables, with the aim of seeking the change of an outcome when "manipulating" a variable while given a set of plausible confounding variables which affect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Le

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

Causal inference is known to be very challenging when only observational data are available. Randomized experiments are often costly and impractical and in instrumental variable regression the number of instruments has to exceed the number…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-19 Dominik Rothenhäusler , Peter Bühlmann , Nicolai Meinshausen

Analysts often make visual causal inferences about possible data-generating models. However, visual analytics (VA) software tends to leave these models implicit in the mind of the analyst, which casts doubt on the statistical validity of…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Alex Kale , Yifan Wu , Jessica Hullman

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

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

Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2022-04-06 Erica EM Moodie , David A Stephens

Bipartite experiments are a recent object of study in causal inference, whereby treatment is applied to one set of units and outcomes of interest are measured on a different set of units. These experiments are particularly useful in…

Causal inference is often portrayed as fundamentally distinct from predictive modeling, with its own terminology, goals, and intellectual challenges. But at its core, causal inference is simply a structured instance of prediction under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Carlos Fernández-Loría

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