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Experimental research on behavior and cognition frequently rests on stimulus or subject selection where not all characteristics can be fully controlled, even when attempting strict matching. For example, when contrasting patients to…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-29 Jona Sassenhagen , Phillip M. Alday

This paper uses model symmetries in the instrumental variable (IV) regression to derive an invariant test for the causal structural parameter. Contrary to popular belief, we show that there exist model symmetries when equation errors are…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-02 Marcelo J. Moreira , Mahrad Sharifvaghefi , Geert Ridder

Testing conditional independence between two random vectors given a third is a fundamental and challenging problem in statistics, particularly in multivariate nonparametric settings due to the complexity of conditional structures. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-28 Chenxuan He , Yuan Gao , Liping Zhu , Jian Huang

Gene expression and phenotype association can be affected by potential unmeasured confounders from multiple sources, leading to biased estimates of the associations. Since genetic variants largely explain gene expression variations, they…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-23 Jiarui Lu , Hongzhe Li

The use of autonomous vehicles in real-world applications is often precluded by the difficulty of providing safety guarantees for their complex controllers. The simulation-based testing of these controllers cannot deliver sufficient safety…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Simon Foster , Mario Gleirscher , Radu Calinescu

Instrumental variables have been widely used for estimating the causal effect between exposure and outcome. Conventional estimation methods require complete knowledge about all the instruments' validity; a valid instrument must not have a…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-09-23 Hyunseung Kang , Anru Zhang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

We analyze different types of simulations that applied researchers can use to assess whether their inference methods reliably control false-positive rates. We show that different assessments involve trade-offs, varying in the types of…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-03 Bruno Ferman

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

The instrumental variables (IV) method is a method for making causal inferences about the effect of a treatment based on an observational study in which there are unmeasured confounding variables. The method requires a valid IV, a variable…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-08-19 Dylan Small , Zhiqiang Tan , Scott Lorch , Alan Brookhart

Conditional independence tests (CIT) are widely used for causal discovery and feature selection. Even with false discovery rate (FDR) control procedures, they often fail to provide frequentist guarantees in practice. We highlight two common…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-25 Milleno Pan , Antoine de Mathelin , Wesley Tansey

Various issues related to the complexity of apprais- ing the capabilities of physics models implemented in Monte Carlo simulation codes and the evolution of the functional quality the associated software are considered, such as the…

Positive predictive value and negative predictive value are two widely used parameters to assess the clinical usefulness of a medical diagnostic test. When there are two diagnostic tests, it is recommendable to make a comparative assessment…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-29 Antonio Martín Andrés , Pedro Femia Marzo

This paper presents Bayesian techniques for conservative claims about software reliability, particularly when evidence suggests the software's executions are not statistically independent. We formalise informal notions of "doubting" that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Kizito Salako , Xingyu Zhao

Instrumental variables (IV) estimation suffers selection bias when the analysis conditions on the treatment. Judea Pearl's early graphical definition of instrumental variables explicitly prohibited conditioning on the treatment.…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-20 Felix Elwert , Elan Segarra

A test is said to control for type I error if it is unlikely to reject the data-generating process. However, if it is possible to produce stochastic processes at random such that, for all possible future realizations of the data, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-04-03 Wojciech Olszewski , Alvaro Sandroni

This paper provides a general framework for testing instrument validity in heterogeneous causal effect models. The generalization includes the cases where the treatment can be multivalued ordered or unordered. Based on a series of testable…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-10-11 Zhenting Sun

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

A popular framework for false discovery control is the random effects model in which the null hypotheses are assumed to be independent. This paper generalizes the random effects model to a conditional dependence model which allows…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Wei Biao Wu

Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-30 M. Usaid Awan , Yameng Liu , Marco Morucci , Sudeepa Roy , Cynthia Rudin , Alexander Volfovsky

Conditional-independence-based discovery uses statistical tests to identify a graphical model that represents the independence structure of variables in a dataset. These tests, however, can be unreliable, and algorithms are sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Philipp M. Faller , Dominik Janzing