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We consider the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from purely observational data in the bi-directional Mendelian randomization (MR), where some invalid instruments, as well as unmeasured confounding, usually exist. To address…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-15 Feng Xie , Zhen Yao , Lin Xie , Yan Zeng , Zhi Geng

Causal inference is to estimate the causal effect in a causal relationship when intervention is applied. Precisely, in a causal model with binary interventions, i.e., control and treatment, the causal effect is simply the difference between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Zhenyu Lu , Yurong Cheng , Mingjun Zhong , George Stoian , Ye Yuan , Guoren Wang

This paper studies the partial identification of treatment effects in Instrumental Variables (IV) settings with binary outcomes under violations of independence. I derive the identified sets for the treatment parameters of interest in the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-03 Pedro Picchetti

In this paper, we study nonparametric estimation of instrumental variable (IV) regressions. Recently, many flexible machine learning methods have been developed for instrumental variable estimation. However, these methods have at least one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-13 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Whitney Newey , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Masatoshi Uehara

Standard instrumental variables (IV) methods identify a Local Average Treatment Effect under monotonicity, which rules out defiers. In many empirical environments, however, distinct instruments may induce heterogeneous and even opposing…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-16 Johann Caro-Burnett

The recent availability of huge, many-dimensional data sets, like those arising from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), provides many opportunities for strengthening causal inference. One popular approach is to utilize these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-21 Ioan Gabriel Bucur , Tom Claassen , Tom Heskes

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

Observational studies can play a useful role in assessing the comparative effectiveness of competing treatments. In a clinical trial the randomization of participants to treatment and control groups generally results in well-balanced groups…

Mediation analysis is a strategy for understanding the mechanisms by which treatments or interventions affect later outcomes. Mediation analysis is frequently applied in randomized trial settings, but typically assumes: a) that randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-30 Kara E. Rudolph , Nicholas Williams , Ivan Diaz

Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) from observational data is relevant in many fields such as personalized medicine. However, in practice, the treatment assignment is usually confounded by unobserved variables and thus…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-24 Dennis Frauen , Stefan Feuerriegel

The technique of data augmentation (DA) is often used in machine learning for regularization purposes to better generalize under i.i.d. settings. In this work, we present a unifying framework with topics in causal inference to make a case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Uzair Akbar , Niki Kilbertus , Hao Shen , Krikamol Muandet , Bo Dai

Instrumental variables (IVs), sources of treatment randomization that are conditionally independent of the outcome, play an important role in causal inference with unobserved confounders. However, the existing IV-based counterfactual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-14 Junkun Yuan , Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Fei Wu , Lanfen Lin

We provide a new flexible framework for inference with the instrumental variable model. Rather than using linear specifications, functions characterizing the effects of instruments and other explanatory variables are estimated using machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-03 Robert E. McCulloch , Rodney A. Sparapani , Brent R. Logan , Purushottam W. Laud

Many identification results in instrumental variables (IV) models hold without requiring any restrictions on the distribution of potential outcomes, or how those outcomes are correlated with selection behavior. This enables IV models to…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-02-28 Leonard Goff

Missing exposure information is a very common feature of many observational studies. Here we study identifiability and efficient estimation of causal effects on vector outcomes, in such cases where treatment is unconfounded but partially…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-04 Edward H. Kennedy

Cox's proportional hazards model is one of the most popular statistical models to evaluate associations of exposure with a censored failure time outcome. When confounding factors are not fully observed, the exposure hazard ratio estimated…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-01-04 Linbo Wang , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen , Torben Martinussen , Stijn Vansteelandt

The method of instrumental variables (IV) provides a framework to study causal effects in both randomized experiments with noncompliance and in observational studies where natural circumstances produce as-if random nudges to accept…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-07 Hyunseung Kang , Laura Peck , Luke Keele

Instrumental-variable (IV) regression enables causal estimation under endogeneity, but modern IV problems often involve nonlinear structural effects and high-dimensional covariates. Existing nonlinear IV methods directly learn the causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Guyue Luo , Qiao Liu

Instrumental variables (IV) methods are central to applied microeconomics. While classical approaches assume linear models with constant effects, recent literature has shifted toward the local average treatment effect (LATE) framework to…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-15 Tymon Słoczyński , Liyang Sun , S. Derya Uysal

Causal inference from observational datasets often relies on measuring and adjusting for covariates. In practice, measurements of the covariates can often be noisy and/or biased, or only measurements of their proxies may be available.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Mingzhang Yin , Yixin Wang , Michael I. Jordan