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The aim of this paper is to discuss a recent result which shows that probabilistic inference in the presence of (unknown) causal mechanisms can be tractable for models that have traditionally been viewed as intractable. This result was…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Adnan Darwiche

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan

Causal inference is the process of estimating the effect or impact of a treatment on an outcome with other covariates as potential confounders (and mediators) that may need to be controlled. The vast majority of existing methods and systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Arun S. Maiya

This paper develops a general causal inference method for treatment effects models with noisily measured confounders. The key feature is that a large set of noisy measurements are linked with the underlying latent confounders through an…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-10-14 Yingjie Feng

Observational data is increasingly used as a means for making individual-level causal predictions and intervention recommendations. The foremost challenge of causal inference from observational data is hidden confounding, whose presence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Nathan Kallus , Aahlad Manas Puli , Uri Shalit

There is abundant observational data in the software engineering domain, whereas running large-scale controlled experiments is often practically impossible. Thus, most empirical studies can only report statistical correlations -- instead of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Carlo A. Furia , Richard Torkar , Robert Feldt

The assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (iid) is standard in many areas of statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, in some settings, such as social networks, infectious disease modeling, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-06 Eli Sherman , Ilya Shpitser

This paper serves as a starting point for machine learning researchers, engineers and students who are interested in but not yet familiar with causal inference. We start by laying out an important set of assumptions that are collectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Daniel Jiwoong Im , Kyunghyun Cho

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-24 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

We address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding, a setting where both treatment assignment and observed outcomes of individuals may be influenced by their neighbors within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Abhishek Dalvi , Neil Ashtekar , Vasant Honavar

Establishing causal relations between random variables from observational data is perhaps the most important challenge in today's \blue{science}. In remote sensing and geosciences this is of special relevance to better understand the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-10 Adrián Pérez-Suay , Gustau Camps-Valls

Relationship between two popular modeling frameworks of causal inference from observational data, namely, causal graphical model and potential outcome causal model is discussed. How some popular causal effect estimators found in…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-03 Priyantha Wijayatunga

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 discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

Discovering causal relationships is a hard task, often hindered by the need for intervention, and often requiring large amounts of data to resolve statistical uncertainty. However, humans quickly arrive at useful causal relationships. One…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-12-01 Pedro A. Ortega

Probabilistic machine learning models are often insufficient to help with decisions on interventions because those models find correlations - not causal relationships. If observational data is only available and experimentation are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Marios Papamichalis , Abhishek Ray , Ilias Bilionis , Karthik Kannan , Rajiv Krishnamurthy

Scientists regularly pose questions about treatment effects on outcomes conditional on a post-treatment event. However, causal inference in such settings requires care, even in perfectly executed randomized experiments. Recently, the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-19 Chan Park , Mats Stensrud , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Background. Starting from the 1960s, practitioners and researchers have looked for ways to empirically investigate new technologies such as inspecting the effectiveness of new methods, tools, or practices. With this purpose, the empirical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-08-14 Nyyti Saarimäki

The capacity to address counterfactual "what if" inquiries is crucial for understanding and making use of causal influences. Traditional counterfactual inference, under Pearls' counterfactual framework, typically depends on having access to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Shaoan Xie , Biwei Huang , Bin Gu , Tongliang Liu , Kun Zhang

Causal Bayesian networks are 'causal' models since they make predictions about interventional distributions. To connect such causal model predictions to real-world outcomes, we must determine which actions in the world correspond to which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-04 Frederik Hytting Jørgensen , Luigi Gresele , Sebastian Weichwald

Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Md Musfiqur Rahman , Ziwei Jiang , Hilaf Hasson , Murat Kocaoglu