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Related papers: A Practical Approach to Causal Inference over Time

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We generalize the potential outcome framework to time series with an intervention by defining causal effects on stochastic processes. Interventions in dynamic systems alter not only outcome levels but also evolutionary dynamics -- changing…

We develop a framework for causal inference with continuous spatiotemporal point-process outcomes under cell-level interventions and outcome spillover. Potential outcomes are indexed by full treatment allocations, and the observed…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Conor Kresin , Duncan A. Clark , Louis Davis , Martin Hazelton

Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer",…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-25 Vidushi Adlakha , Eric Kuo

Bivariate structural causal models (SCM) are often used to infer causal direction by examining their goodness-of-fit under restricted model classes. In this paper, we describe a parametrization of bivariate SCMs in terms of a causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-11 Johnny Xi , Hugh Dance , Peter Orbanz , Benjamin Bloem-Reddy

Causal inference for observational longitudinal studies often requires the accurate estimation of treatment effects on time-to-event outcomes in the presence of time-dependent patient history and time-dependent covariates. To tackle this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-17 Jie Zhu , Blanca Gallego

It has become increasingly common nowadays to collect observations of feature and response pairs from different environments. As a consequence, one has to apply learned predictors to data with a different distribution due to distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-31 Kang Du , Yu Xiang

Linear structural causal models (SCMs) -- in which each observed variable is generated by a subset of the other observed variables as well as a subset of the exogenous sources -- are pervasive in causal inference and casual discovery.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Yuqin Yang , Mohamed Nafea , AmirEmad Ghassami , Negar Kiyavash

Causal discovery, i.e., inferring underlying causal relationships from observational data, is highly challenging for AI systems. In a time series modeling context, traditional causal discovery methods mainly consider constrained scenarios…

Structural Causal Models (SCMs) offer a principled framework to reason about interventions and support out-of-distribution generalization, which are key goals in scientific discovery. However, the task of learning SCMs from observed data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Divyat Mahajan , Jannes Gladrow , Agrin Hilmkil , Cheng Zhang , Meyer Scetbon

Instrumental variable (IV) regression relies on instruments to infer causal effects from observational data with unobserved confounding. We consider IV regression in time series models, such as vector auto-regressive (VAR) processes. Direct…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-23 Nikolaj Thams , Rikke Søndergaard , Sebastian Weichwald , Jonas Peters

Deciding on an appropriate intervention requires a causal model of a treatment, the outcome, and potential mediators. Causal mediation analysis lets us distinguish between direct and indirect effects of the intervention, but has mostly been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Çağlar Hızlı , ST John , Anne Juuti , Tuure Saarinen , Kirsi Pietiläinen , Pekka Marttinen

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

We consider a bivariate time series $(X_t,Y_t)$ that is given by a simple linear autoregressive model. Assuming that the equations describing each variable as a linear combination of past values are considered structural equations, there is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-04-12 Dominik Janzing , Paul Rubenstein , Bernhard Schölkopf

Structural Causal Models (SCMs) provide a popular causal modeling framework. In this work, we show that SCMs are not flexible enough to give a complete causal representation of dynamical systems at equilibrium. Instead, we propose a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-08-07 Tineke Blom , Stephan Bongers , Joris M. Mooij

Cause-effect analysis is crucial to understand the underlying mechanism of a system. We propose to exploit model invariance through interventions on the predictors to infer causality in nonlinear multivariate systems of time series. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Wasim Ahmad , Maha Shadaydeh , Joachim Denzler

Causal inference is known to be very challenging when only observational data are available. Randomized experiments are often costly and impractical and in instrumental variable regression the number of instruments has to exceed the number…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-19 Dominik Rothenhäusler , Peter Bühlmann , Nicolai Meinshausen

Causal structure learning with data from multiple contexts carries both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities arise from considering shared and context-specific causal graphs enabling to generalize and transfer causal knowledge across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Martin Rabel , Wiebke Günther , Jakob Runge , Andreas Gerhardus

A structural causal model is made of endogenous (manifest) and exogenous (latent) variables. We show that endogenous observations induce linear constraints on the probabilities of the exogenous variables. This allows to exactly map a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Zaffalon , Alessandro Antonucci , Rafael Cabañas

There exist several approaches for estimating causal effects in time series when latent confounding is present. Many of these approaches rely on additional auxiliary observed variables or time series such as instruments, negative controls…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-27 Tom Hochsprung , Jakob Runge , Andreas Gerhardus

We introduce a performance-driven framework for constructing strictly causal forward-oriented observables in strongly non-stationary time series. The method combines a robustly normalized composite of heterogeneous indicators with a…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-17 Lucas A. Souza