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When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical…

Causal inference studies whether the presence of a variable influences an observed outcome. As measured by quantities such as the "average treatment effect," this paradigm is employed across numerous biological fields, from vaccine and drug…

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-04-24 Priyantha Wijayatunga

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

To draw scientifically meaningful conclusions and build reliable models of quantitative phenomena, cause and effect must be taken into consideration (either implicitly or explicitly). This is particularly challenging when the measurements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Max A. Little , Reham Badawy

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a crucial but challenging task. Currently, only a limited number of data-driven causal effect estimation methods are available. These methods either provide only a bound estimation of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-10 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Lee , Jixue Liu

We address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding, a setting where both treatment assignment and observed outcomes of individuals may be influenced by their neighbors within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Abhishek Dalvi , Neil Ashtekar , Vasant Honavar

This paper discusses the problem of causal query in observational data with hidden variables, with the aim of seeking the change of an outcome when "manipulating" a variable while given a set of plausible confounding variables which affect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Le

Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-31 Yang Ou , Lu Tang , Chung-Chou H. Chang

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…

We study identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment variable on a long-term outcome using data from an observational and an experimental domain. The observational data are subject to unobserved confounding. Furthermore,…

Unobserved confounding is one of the greatest challenges for causal discovery. The case in which unobserved variables have a widespread effect on many of the observed ones is particularly difficult because most pairs of variables are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

Many scientific questions in biomedical, environmental, and psychological research involve understanding the effects of multiple factors on outcomes. While factorial experiments are ideal for this purpose, randomized controlled treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-03 Ruoqi Yu , Peng Ding

We develop a data-driven information-theoretic framework for sharp partial identification of causal effects under unmeasured confounding. Existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as bounded or discrete outcomes;…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-24 Yonghan Jung , Bogyeong Kang

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

Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-10-19 Antti Hyttinen , Frederick Eberhardt , Patrik O. Hoyer

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

Knowledge about existence, strength, and dominant direction of causal influences is of paramount importance for understanding complex systems. With limited amounts of realistic data, however, current methods for investigating causal links…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2020-10-20 Erik Laminski , Klaus R. Pawelzik

Causal inference is only valid when its underlying assumptions are satisfied, one of the most central being the ignorability or unconfoundedness assumption. However, this hypothesis is often unrealistic in observational studies, as some…