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Causal inference relies on the untestable assumption of no unmeasured confounding. Sensitivity analysis can be used to quantify the impact of unmeasured confounding on causal estimates. Among sensitivity analysis methods proposed in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-12 Yushu Zou , Liangyuan Hu , Amanda Ricciuto , Mark Deneau , Kuan Liu

Valid estimation of treatment effects from observational data requires proper control of confounding. If the number of covariates is large relative to the number of observations, then controlling for all available covariates is infeasible.…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-11 Joseph Antonelli , Matthew Cefalu , Nathan Palmer , Denis Agniel

Clinical trials traditionally employ blinding as a design mechanism to reduce the influence of placebo effects. In practice, however, it can be difficult or impossible to blind study participants and unblinded trials are common in medical…

Applications · Statistics 2016-06-22 Elias Chaibub Neto

As statistical classifiers become integrated into real-world applications, it is important to consider not only their accuracy but also their robustness to changes in the data distribution. In this paper, we consider the case where there is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-12 Virgile Landeiro , Aron Culotta

Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-31 Yang Ou , Lu Tang , Chung-Chou H. Chang

Understanding and quantifying cause and effect is an important problem in many domains. The generally-agreed solution to this problem is to perform a randomised controlled trial. However, even when randomised controlled trials can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-22 Graham Van Goffrier , Lucas Maystre , Ciarán Gilligan-Lee

External controls from historical trials or observational data can augment randomized controlled trials when large-scale randomization is impractical or unethical, such as in drug evaluation for rare diseases. However, non-randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-08 Ke Zhu , Shu Yang , Xiaofei Wang

Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-18 Shanshan Luo , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li

When observed decisions depend only on observed features, off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) methods for sequential decision making problems can estimate the performance of evaluation policies before deploying them. This assumption is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-13 Hongseok Namkoong , Ramtin Keramati , Steve Yadlowsky , Emma Brunskill

For testing the statistical significance of a treatment effect, we usually compare between two parts of a population, one is exposed to the treatment, and the other is not exposed to it. Standard parametric and nonparametric two-sample…

Computation · Statistics 2012-11-02 Bikram Karmakar , Kumaresh Dhara , Kushal Kumar Dey , Analabha Basu , Anil Ghosh

The heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) lies at the heart of precision medicine. Randomized controlled trials are gold-standard for treatment effect estimation but are typically underpowered for heterogeneous effects. In contrast, large…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-14 Shu Yang , Siyi Liu , Donglin Zeng , Xiaofei Wang

The existence of immune or cured individuals in a population and whether there is sufficient followup in a sample of censored observations on their lifetimes to be confident of their presence are questions of major importance in medical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Ross Maller , Sidney Resnick , Soudabeh Shemehsavar

Unmeasured confounding remains a critical challenge in causal inference for the social sciences. This paper proposes a sensitivity analysis framework to systematically evaluate how unmeasured confounders influence statistical inference in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-21 Cheng Lin , Jose M. Pena , Adel Daoud

Experiments often yield non-identically distributed data for statistical analysis. Tests of hypothesis under such set-ups are generally performed using the likelihood ratio test, which is non-robust with respect to outliers and model…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-07-25 Abhik Ghosh , Ayanendranath Basu

For measuring the strength of visually-observed subpopulation differences, the Population Difference Criterion is proposed to assess the statistical significance of visually observed subpopulation differences. It addresses the following…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-21 Xi Yang , Jan Hannig , Katherine A. Hoadley , Iain Carmichael , J. S. Marron

We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-07 Jose M. Peña

Causal inference is only valid when its underlying assumptions are satisfied, one of the most central being the ignorability or unconfoundedness assumption. However, this hypothesis is often unrealistic in observational studies, as some…

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

Balanced representation learning methods have been applied successfully to counterfactual inference from observational data. However, approaches that account for survival outcomes are relatively limited. Survival data are frequently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-04 Paidamoyo Chapfuwa , Serge Assaad , Shuxi Zeng , Michael J. Pencina , Lawrence Carin , Ricardo Henao

In observational studies, the observed association between an exposure and outcome of interest may be distorted by unobserved confounding. Causal sensitivity analysis can be used to assess the robustness of observed associations to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Rui Hu , Ted Westling