English
Related papers

Related papers: Causal Inference with High-dimensional Discrete Co…

200 papers

Decomposing an exposure effect on an outcome into separate natural indirect effects through multiple mediators requires strict assumptions, such as correctly postulating the causal structure of the mediators, and no unmeasured confounding…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Beatrijs Moerkerke , Tom Loeys , Stijn Vansteelandt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Feng Xie , Zhengming Chen , Shanshan Luo , Wang Miao , Ruichu Cai , Zhi Geng

We study the problem of treatment effect estimation in randomized experiments with high-dimensional covariate information, and show that essentially any risk-consistent regression adjustment can be used to obtain efficient estimates of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-08 Stefan Wager , Wenfei Du , Jonathan Taylor , Robert Tibshirani

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Felix Schur , Niklas Pfister , Peng Ding , Sach Mukherjee , Jonas Peters

We study the causal effect with a functional treatment variable, where practical applications often arise in neuroscience, biomedical sciences, etc. Previous research concerning the effect of a functional variable on an outcome is typically…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-20 Ruoxu Tan , Wei Huang , Zheng Zhang , Guosheng Yin

We propose a new estimation method for heterogeneous causal effects which utilizes a regression discontinuity (RD) design for multiple datasets with different thresholds. The standard RD design is frequently used in applied researches, but…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-05-14 Takayuki Toda , Ayako Wakano , Takahiro Hoshino

Despite the major advances taken in causal modeling, causality is still an unfamiliar topic for many statisticians. In this paper, it is demonstrated from the beginning to the end how causal effects can be estimated from observational data…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-07-03 Juha Karvanen

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a challenging problem, especially with high dimensional data and in the presence of unobserved variables. The available data-driven methods for tackling the problem either provide an…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-24 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan

Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Saksham Jain , Alex Luedtke

Causal inference plays an important role in under standing the underlying mechanisation of the data generation process across various domains. It is challenging to estimate the average causal effect and individual causal effects from…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Haoran Zhao , Yinghao Zhang , Debo Cheng , Chen Li , Zaiwen Feng

In longitudinal studies where units are embedded in space or a social network, interference may arise, meaning that a unit's outcome can depend on treatment histories of others. The presence of interference poses significant challenges for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-26 Ye Wang , Michael Jetsupphasuk

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are often considered the gold standard for estimating causal effect, but they may lack external validity when the population eligible to the RCT is substantially different from the target population.…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-11 Bénédicte Colnet , Julie Josse , Erwan Scornet , Gaël Varoquaux

Difference-in-differences (DiD) is a cornerstone of causal inference, yet extending it to functional outcomes is not a routine scalar generalization; rather, it entails three fundamental challenges in identification, inference, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-29 Junzhu Nie , Chengxiu Ling , Mengfei Ran

To investigate causal mechanisms, causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into the natural direct and indirect effects. This paper examines the estimation of the direct and indirect effects in a general treatment…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-24 Lukang Huang , Wei Huang , Oliver Linton , Zheng Zhang

Making causal inferences from observational studies can be challenging when confounders are missing not at random. In such cases, identifying causal effects is often not guaranteed. Motivated by a real example, we consider a…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-31 Jian Sun , Bo Fu

This paper aims to provide practitioners of causal mediation analysis with a better understanding of estimation options. We take as inputs two familiar strategies (weighting and model-based prediction) and a simple way of combining them…

There has been a growing interest in covariate adjustment in the analysis of randomized controlled trials in past years. For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently issued guidance that emphasizes the importance of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-12 Kelly Van Lancker , Frank Bretz , Oliver Dukes

Proximal causal inference was recently proposed as a framework to identify causal effects from observational data in the presence of hidden confounders for which proxies are available. In this paper, we extend the proximal causal inference…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-27 AmirEmad Ghassami , Alan Yang , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen