English
Related papers

Related papers: Bounding Causal Effects with Leaky Instruments

200 papers

Instrumental variables have been widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. Existing confidence intervals for causal effects based on instrumental variables assume that all of the putative instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-07-14 Hyunseung Kang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

A popular way to estimate the causal effect of a variable x on y from observational data is to use an instrumental variable (IV): a third variable z that affects y only through x. The more strongly z is associated with x, the more reliable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Zhaobin Kuang , Frederic Sala , Nimit Sohoni , Sen Wu , Aldo Córdova-Palomera , Jared Dunnmon , James Priest , Christopher Ré

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to study the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome in the presence of unmeasured confounding. IVs require an instrument, a variable that is (A1) associated with the exposure, (A2) has no…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-30 Hyunseung Kang , Zijian Guo , Zhonghua Liu , Dylan Small

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

Instrumental variable (IV) is a powerful approach to inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data even when there exist latent confounders between the treatment and the outcome. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Lee , Jixue Liu

Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

Instrumental variables (IV) are often used to identify causal effects in observational settings and experiments subject to non-compliance. Under canonical assumptions, IVs allow us to identify a so-called local average treatment effect…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-03 Luca Locher , Mats J. Stensrud , Aaron L. Sarvet

Unlike other techniques of causality inference, the use of valid instrumental variables can deal with unobserved sources of both variable errors, variable omissions, and sampling bias, and still arrive at consistent estimates of average…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-02-17 Øyvind Hoveid

Inference for causal effects can benefit from the availability of an instrumental variable (IV) which, by definition, is associated with the given exposure, but not with the outcome of interest other than through a causal exposure effect.…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-01-13 Stijn Vansteelandt , Jack Bowden , Manoochehr Babanezhad , Els Goetghebeur

Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are central to causal inference from observational data, particularly when a randomized experiment is not feasible. However, of the three conventional core IV identification conditions, only one, IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-23 Zhonghua Liu , Baoluo Sun , Ting Ye , David Richardson , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Unobserved confounding is the main obstacle to causal effect estimation from observational data. Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for causal effect estimation when there exist latent confounders. With the standard IV method,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Thuc duy Le , Jixue Liu

Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Danielle Tsao , Krikamol Muandet , Frederick Eberhardt , Emilija Perković

Instrumental variable approaches have gained popularity for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However, the availability of instrumental variables in the primary dataset is often challenged due to stringent…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Kang Shuai , Shanshan Luo , Wei Li , Yangbo He

Instrumental variable (IV) methods mitigate bias from unobserved confounding in observational causal inference but rely on the availability of a valid instrument, which can often be difficult or infeasible to identify in practice. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-08 Frances Dean , Jenna Fields , Radhika Bhalerao , Marie Charpignon , Ahmed Alaa

Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

Instrumental variable (IV) regression relies on instruments to infer causal effects from observational data with unobserved confounding. We consider IV regression in time series models, such as vector auto-regressive (VAR) processes. Direct…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-23 Nikolaj Thams , Rikke Søndergaard , Sebastian Weichwald , Jonas Peters

This paper studies the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from observational data, in the presence of unobserved confounders. The two-stage least square (TSLS) method and its variants with a standard instrumental variable (IV)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

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

We discuss the fundamental issue of identification in linear instrumental variable (IV) models with unknown IV validity. With the assumption of the "sparsest rule", which is equivalent to the plurality rule but becomes operational in…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-06 Yiqi Lin , Frank Windmeijer , Xinyuan Song , Qingliang Fan