Related papers: Auditing Fairness under Unobserved Confounding

Fairness for machine learning predictions is widely required in practice for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. Existing work typically focuses on settings without unobserved confounding, even though unobserved confounding can lead to…

In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…

Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings with selective labels: outcomes are observed only for units selected by past decision makers. This creates an identification problem under unobserved confounding -- when…

Causal inference with observational data can be performed under an assumption of no unobserved confounders (unconfoundedness assumption). There is, however, seldom clear subject-matter or empirical evidence for such an assumption. We…

In the era of fast-paced precision medicine, observational studies play a major role in properly evaluating new treatments in clinical practice. Yet, unobserved confounding can significantly compromise causal conclusions drawn from…

Assessing the fairness of a decision making system with respect to a protected class, such as gender or race, is challenging when class membership labels are unavailable. Probabilistic models for predicting the protected class based on…

We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…

Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…

We study the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational data while accounting for possible unobserved confounding. Previous approaches, which assume unconfoundedness, i.e., that no unobserved confounders affect…

On a variety of complex decision-making tasks, from doctors prescribing treatment to judges setting bail, machine learning algorithms have been shown to outperform expert human judgments. One complication, however, is that it is often…

The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…

Causal approaches to fairness have seen substantial recent interest, both from the machine learning community and from wider parties interested in ethical prediction algorithms. In no small part, this has been due to the fact that causal…

We examine interval estimation of the effect of a treatment T on an outcome Y given the existence of an unobserved confounder U. Using H\"older's inequality, we derive a set of bounds on the confounding bias |E[Y|T=t]-E[Y|do(T=t)]| based on…

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…

No unmeasured confounding is often assumed in estimating treatment effects in observational data when using approaches such as propensity scores and inverse probability weighting. However, in many such studies due to the limitation of the…

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…

Various methods have recently been proposed to estimate causal effects with confidence intervals that are uniformly valid over a set of data generating processes when high-dimensional nuisance models are estimated by post-model-selection or…

We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an observed association without known mechanism must be in want of a causal estimate. However, causal estimation from observational data often relies on the (untestable) assumption of `no…

In observational studies, identification of ATEs is generally achieved by assuming that the correct set of confounders has been measured and properly included in the relevant models. Because this assumption is both strong and untestable, a…