Related papers: The most likely common cause

A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…

Causal inference methods based on conditional independence construct Markov equivalent graphs, and cannot be applied to bivariate cases. The approaches based on independence of cause and mechanism state, on the contrary, that causal…

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental obstacle to establishing valid causal conclusions from observational data. Two complementary types of approaches have been developed to address this obstacle: obtaining identification using fortuitous…

In recent years, many methods have been developed for detecting causal relationships in observational data. Some of them have the potential to tackle large data sets. However, these methods fail to discover a combined cause, i.e. a…

The conditionality principle $C$ plays a key role in attempts to characterize the concept of statistical evidence. The standard version of $C$ considers a model and a derived conditional model, formed by conditioning on an ancillary…

Identifying causal relationships from observation data is difficult, in large part, due to the presence of hidden common causes. In some cases, where just the right patterns of conditional independence and dependence lie in the data---for…

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…

Probabilities of Causation play a fundamental role in decision making in law, health care and public policy. Nevertheless, their point identification is challenging, requiring strong assumptions such as monotonicity. In the absence of such…

We study causal inference under case-control and case-population sampling. Specifically, we focus on the binary-outcome and binary-treatment case, where the parameters of interest are causal relative and attributable risks defined via the…

We consider a discrete latent variable model for two-way data arrays, which allows one to simultaneously produce clusters along one of the data dimensions (e.g. exchangeable observational units or features) and contiguous groups, or…

Causal structures give us a way to understand the origin of observed correlations. These were developed for classical scenarios, but quantum mechanical experiments necessitate their generalisation. Here we study causal structures in a broad…

Unobserved confounding is a major hurdle for causal inference from observational data. Confounders---the variables that affect both the causes and the outcome---induce spurious non-causal correlations between the two. Wang & Blei (2018)…

A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed…

Given data over variables $(X_1,...,X_m, Y)$ we consider the problem of finding out whether $X$ jointly causes $Y$ or whether they are all confounded by an unobserved latent variable $Z$. To do so, we take an information-theoretic approach…

We study the parameter estimation problem in mixture models with observational nonidentifiability: the full model (also containing hidden variables) is identifiable, but the marginal (observed) model is not. Hence global maxima of the…

Entropic causal inference is a framework for inferring the causal direction between two categorical variables from observational data. The central assumption is that the amount of unobserved randomness in the system is not too large. This…

The causal Markov condition (CMC) is a postulate that links observations to causality. It describes the conditional independences among the observations that are entailed by a causal hypothesis in terms of a directed acyclic graph. In the…

Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…

The Principle of Insufficient Reason (PIR) assigns equal probabilities to each alternative of a random experiment whenever there is no reason to prefer one over the other. The Maximum Entropy Principle (MaxEnt) generalizes PIR to the case…

Bell's 1964 theorem causes a severe problem for the notion that correlations require explanation, encapsulated in Reichenbach's Principle of Common Cause. Despite being a hallmark of scientific thought, dropping the principle has been…