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Related papers: Conservative Inference for Counterfactuals

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In causal inference, a fundamental task is to estimate the effect resulting from a specific treatment, which is often handled with inverse probability weighting. Despite an abundance of attention to the advancement of this task, most…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-30 Kuan-Hsun Wu

Invariant prediction uses the prediction stability of causal relationships across different environments to identify causal variables. Conversely, using causal variables gives prediction guarantees even in out-of-sample data settings. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Lucas Kania , Ernst Wit

We introduce new inference procedures for counterfactual and synthetic control methods for policy evaluation. We recast the causal inference problem as a counterfactual prediction and a structural breaks testing problem. This allows us to…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-26 Victor Chernozhukov , Kaspar Wüthrich , Yinchu Zhu

Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-09 Lin Gui , Victor Veitch

The causal dose response curve is commonly selected as the statistical parameter of interest in studies where the goal is to understand the effect of a continuous exposure on an outcome.Most of the available methodology for statistical…

Causal effects are usually studied in terms of the means of counterfactual distributions, which may be insufficient in many scenarios. Given a class of densities known up to normalizing constants, we propose to model counterfactual…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-20 Diego Martinez-Taboada , Edward H. Kennedy

Causal inference using observational data is challenging, especially in the bivariate case. Through the minimum description length principle, we link the postulate of independence between the generating mechanisms of the cause and of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-17 Natasa Tagasovska , Valérie Chavez-Demoulin , Thibault Vatter

Counterfactual explanations are a central tool in interpretable machine learning, yet computing them exactly for complex models remains challenging. For tree ensembles, predictions are piecewise constant over a large collection of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Awa Khouna , Julien Ferry , Thibaut Vidal

This paper proposes a framework to analyze the effects of counterfactual policies on the unconditional quantiles of an outcome variable. For a given counterfactual policy, we obtain identified sets for the effect of both marginal and global…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-07 Julian Martinez-Iriarte

With multiple outcomes in empirical research, a common strategy is to define a composite outcome as a weighted average of the original outcomes. However, the choices of weights are often subjective and can be controversial. We propose an…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Wei Zhang , Qizhai Li , Peng Ding

Causal questions often permeate in our day-to-day activities. With causal reasoning and counterfactual intuition, privacy threats can not only be alleviated but also prevented. In this paper, we discuss what is causal and counterfactual…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Rakshit Naidu , Navid Kagalwalla

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

Measuring treatment effects in observational studies is challenging because of confounding bias. Confounding occurs when a variable affects both the treatment and the outcome. Traditional methods such as propensity score matching estimate…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-23 Bevan I. Smith , Charles Chimedza

We consider problems in which a system receives external \emph{perturbations} from time to time. For instance, the system can be a train network in which particular lines are repeatedly disrupted without warning, having an effect on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-21 Nicolo Colombo , Ricardo Silva , Soong M Kang , Arthur Gretton

We present a simple proof for bounding the smallest eigenvalue of the empirical covariance in a causal Gaussian process. Along the way, we establish a one-sided tail inequality for Gaussian quadratic forms using a causal decomposition. Our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-31 Ingvar Ziemann

We propose a model-free framework for sensitivity analysis of individual treatment effects (ITEs), building upon ideas from conformal inference. For any unit, our procedure reports the $\Gamma$-value, a number which quantifies the minimum…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-26 Ying Jin , Zhimei Ren , Emmanuel J. Candès

Counterfactual explanations (CE) aim to reveal how small input changes flip a model's prediction, yet many methods modify more features than necessary, reducing clarity and actionability. We introduce \emph{COLA}, a model- and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Lei You , Yijun Bian , Lele Cao

We develop a novel method for counterfactual analysis based on observational data using prediction intervals for units under different exposures. Unlike methods that target heterogeneous or conditional average treatment effects of an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-07-18 Dave Zachariah , Petre Stoica

Much research has been devoted to the problem of learning fair representations; however, they do not explicitly the relationship between latent representations. In many real-world applications, there may be causal relationships between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Ziqi Xu , Jixue Liu , Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Ke Wang

Answering counterfactual queries has important applications such as explainability, robustness, and fairness but is challenging when the causal variables are unobserved and the observations are non-linear mixtures of these latent variables,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zeyu Zhou , Ruqi Bai , Sean Kulinski , Murat Kocaoglu , David I. Inouye