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To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-01 Roy S. Zawadzki , Joshua D. Grill , Daniel L. Gillen

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Helen Guo , Ilya Shpitser , Elizabeth L. Ogburn

We consider the problem of causal effect estimation with an unobserved confounder, where we observe a single proxy variable that is associated with the confounder. Although it has been shown that the recovery of an average causal effect is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-19 Liyuan Xu , Arthur Gretton

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

Causal inference has numerous real-world applications in many domains, such as health care, marketing, political science, and online advertising. Treatment effect estimation, a fundamental problem in causal inference, has been extensively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Zhixuan Chu , Jianmin Huang , Ruopeng Li , Wei Chu , Sheng Li

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

Causal effect estimation is a critical task in statistical learning that aims to find the causal effect on subjects by identifying causal links between a number of predictor (or, explanatory) variables and the outcome of a treatment. In a…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-26 Tathagata Basu , Matthias C. M. Troffaes

Overlap, also known as positivity, is a key condition for causal treatment effect estimation. Many popular estimators suffer from high variance and become brittle when features differ strongly across treatment groups. This is especially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-02 Oscar Clivio , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks , David Bruns-Smith , Chris Holmes , Avi Feller

Given a causal graph, the do-calculus can express treatment effects as functionals of the observational joint distribution that can be estimated empirically. Sometimes the do-calculus identifies multiple valid formulae, prompting us to…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-15 Shantanu Gupta , Zachary C. Lipton , David Childers

We consider the problem of estimating the expected causal effect $E[Y|do(X)]$ for a target variable $Y$ when treatment $X$ is set by intervention, focusing on continuous random variables. In settings without selection bias or confounding,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-27 Marlies Hafer , Alexander Marx

The fundamental problem in treatment effect estimation from observational data is confounder identification and balancing. Most of the previous methods realized confounder balancing by treating all observed pre-treatment variables as…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Junkun Yuan , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Qiang Zhu , Yueting Zhuang , Fei Wu

An essential problem in causal inference is estimating causal effects from observational data. The problem becomes more challenging with the presence of unobserved confounders. When there are unobserved confounders, the commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Ziqi Xu , Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Jixue Liu , Lin Liu , Kui Yu

We consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in linear structural causal models (SCM) with latent confounders when we have access to a single proxy variable. Several methods (such as…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yaroslav Kivva , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash

A key to causal inference with observational data is achieving balance in predictive features associated with each treatment type. Recent literature has explored representation learning to achieve this goal. In this work, we discuss the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-25 Serge Assaad , Shuxi Zeng , Chenyang Tao , Shounak Datta , Nikhil Mehta , Ricardo Henao , Fan Li , Lawrence Carin

Causal mediation analysis has been extended to estimate path-specific effects with multiple intermediate variables, isolating treatment effects through a mediator of interest while excluding pathways through its ancestors. Such analyses…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yang Bai , Sihan Wu , Baoluo Sun , Yifan Cui

This research addresses the challenge of conducting interpretable causal inference between a binary treatment and its resulting outcome when not all confounders are known. Confounders are factors that have an influence on both the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Sohaib Kiani , Jared Barton , Jon Sushinsky , Lynda Heimbach , Bo Luo

We propose nonparametric identification and semiparametric estimation of joint potential outcome distributions in the presence of confounding. First, in settings with observed confounding, we derive tighter, covariate-informed bounds on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-19 Jianle Sun , Kun Zhang

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are used to estimate causal effects in settings with unobserved confounding, where we cannot directly experiment on the treatment variable. Instruments are variables which only affect the outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-26 Elisabeth Ailer , Jason Hartford , Niki Kilbertus

Causal inference of exact individual treatment outcomes in the presence of hidden confounders is rarely possible. Recent work has extended prediction intervals with finite-sample guarantees to partially identifiable causal outcomes, by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Myrl G. Marmarelis , Greg Ver Steeg , Aram Galstyan , Fred Morstatter

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…