Related papers: Cascade-based Randomization for Inferring Causal E…
Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…
Causal inference in networks should account for interference, which occurs when a unit's outcome is influenced by treatments or outcomes of peers. Heterogeneous peer influence (HPI) occurs when a unit's outcome is influenced differently by…
Algorithms for constraint-based causal discovery select graphical causal models among a space of possible candidates (e.g., all directed acyclic graphs) by executing a sequence of conditional independence tests. These may be used to inform…
When trying to maximize the adoption of a behavior in a population connected by a social network, it is common to strategize about where in the network to seed the behavior, often with an element of randomness. Selecting seeds uniformly at…
Evaluating the causal effect of an intervention on multivariate outcomes is challenging when the outcomes are interdependent and derived rather than directly observed. Effective connectivity, which summarizes the directional neural…
We study the propagation of information in social networks. To do so, we focus on a cascade model where nodes are infected with {probability $p_1$ after their first contact with the information and with probability $p_2$ at all subsequent…
In contrast to problems of interference in (exogenous) treatments, models of interference in unit-specific (endogenous) outcomes do not usually produce a reduced-form representation where outcomes depend on other units' treatment status…
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…
The spread of new ideas, behaviors or technologies has been extensively studied using epidemic models. Here we consider a model of diffusion where the individuals' behavior is the result of a strategic choice. We study a simple coordination…
Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…
Cascading failures constitute an important vulnerability of interconnected systems. Here we focus on the study of such failures on networks in which the connectivity of nodes is constrained by geographical distance. Specifically, we use…
The health effects of environmental exposures have been studied for decades, typically using standard regression models to assess exposure-outcome associations found in observational non-experimental data. We propose and illustrate a…
In social networks, the collective behavior of large populations can be shaped by a small set of influencers through a cascading process induced by "peer pressure". For large-scale networks, efficient identification of multiple influential…
In bipartite causal inference with interference, interventional units might receive treatment or control, and they might affect the outcome of outcome units through their connections on a bipartite network. We study bipartite causal…
Causal inference has gained much popularity in recent years, with interests ranging from academic, to industrial, to educational, and all in between. Concurrently, the study and usage of neural networks has also grown profoundly (albeit at…
Estimating total treatment effects in the presence of network interference typically requires knowledge of the underlying interaction structure. However, in many practical settings, network data is either unavailable, incomplete, or…
In estimating the effects of a treatment/policy with a network, an unit is subject to two types of treatment: one is the direct treatment on the unit itself, and the other is the indirect treatment (i.e., network/spillover influence)…
We study cascading failures in smart grids, where an attacker selectively compromises the nodes with probabilities proportional to their degrees, betweenness, or clustering coefficient. This implies that nodes with high degrees,…
Two-stage randomized experiments are becoming an increasingly popular experimental design for causal inference when the outcome of one unit may be affected by the treatment assignments of other units in the same cluster. In this paper, we…
In causal inference, it is common to estimate the causal effect of a single treatment variable on an outcome. However, practitioners may also be interested in the effect of simultaneous interventions on multiple covariates of a fixed target…