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Related papers: A Unified Framework for Causal Estimand Selection

200 papers

Weighting procedures are used in observational causal inference to adjust for covariate imbalance within the sample. Common practice for inference is to estimate robust standard errors from a weighted regression of outcome on treatment.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-29 Erin Hartman , Chad Hazlett , Arisa Sadeghpour

The target trial framework enables causal inference from longitudinal observational data by emulating randomized trials initiated at multiple time points. Precision is often improved by pooling information across trials, with standard…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-08 Edoardo Efrem Gervasoni , Liesbet De Bus , Stijn Vansteelandt , Oliver Dukes

Oversubscribed treatments are often allocated using randomized waiting lists. Applicants are ranked randomly, and treatment offers are made following that ranking until all seats are filled. To estimate causal effects, researchers often…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-24 Clement de Chaisemartin , Luc Behaghel

This paper extends my research applying statistical decision theory to treatment choice with sample data, using maximum regret to evaluate the performance of treatment rules. The specific new contribution is to study as-if optimization…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-10-05 Charles F. Manski

Machine learning models trained on real-world data may inadvertently make biased predictions that negatively impact marginalized communities. Reweighting, which assigns a weight to each data point used during model training, can mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Anil K. Saini , Jose Guadalupe Hernandez , Emily F. Wong , Debanshi Misra , Tiffani J. Bright , Jason H. Moore

Diagnostic datasets that can detect biased models are an important prerequisite for bias reduction within natural language processing. However, undesired patterns in the collected data can make such tests incorrect. For example, if the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Vid Kocijan , Oana-Maria Camburu , Thomas Lukasiewicz

Observational studies are valuable tools for inferring causal effects in the absence of controlled experiments. However, these studies may be biased due to the presence of some relevant, unmeasured set of covariates. One approach to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-17 William Bekerman , Abhinandan Dalal , Carlo del Ninno , Dylan S. Small

Many common estimators in machine learning and causal inference are linear smoothers, where the prediction is a weighted average of the training outcomes. Some estimators, such as ordinary least squares and kernel ridge regression, allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 David Arbour , Harsh Parikh , Bijan Niknam , Elizabeth Stuart , Kara Rudolph , Avi Feller

We propose novel estimators for categorical and continuous treatments by using an optimal covariate balancing strategy for inverse probability weighting. The resulting estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-08 Seong-ho Lee , Yanyuan Ma , Xavier de Luna

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects is central to data-driven decision-making, yet industrial applications often face a fundamental tension between limited randomized controlled trial (RCT) budgets and abundant but biased…

The choice of making an intervention depends on its potential benefit or harm in comparison to alternatives. Estimating the likely outcome of alternatives from observational data is a challenging problem as all outcomes are never observed,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-18 Yao Zhang , Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

Estimating how a treatment affects units individually, known as heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimation, is an essential part of decision-making and policy implementation. The accumulation of large amounts of data in many domains,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Christopher Tran , Elena Zheleva

Estimating causal effects from observational data is not always possible due to confounding. Identifying a set of appropriate covariates (adjustment set) and adjusting for their influence can remove confounding bias; however, such a set is…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-19 Sofia Triantafillou , Gregory Cooper

Weighting methods in causal inference have been widely used to achieve a desirable level of covariate balancing. However, the existing weighting methods have desirable theoretical properties only when a certain model, either the propensity…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-24 Insung Kong , Yuha Park , Joonhyuk Jung , Kwonsang Lee , Yongdai Kim

Treatment effect estimation, which refers to the estimation of causal effects and aims to measure the strength of the causal relationship, is of great importance in many fields but is a challenging problem in practice. As present,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Zhenyu Guo , Shuai Zheng , Zhizhe Liu , Kun Yan , Zhenfeng Zhu

In causal matching designs, some control subjects are often left unmatched, and some covariates are often left unmodeled. This article introduces "rebar," a method using high-dimensional modeling to incorporate these commonly discarded data…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-26 Adam C Sales , Ben B Hansen , Brian Rowan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Md Musfiqur Rahman , Ziwei Jiang , Hilaf Hasson , Murat Kocaoglu

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for measuring causal effects. However, they are often not always feasible, and causal treatment effects must be estimated from observational data. Observational studies do not allow robust…

We address the weighting problem in voluntary samples under a nonignorable sample selection model. Under the assumption that the sample selection model is correctly specified, we can compute a consistent estimator of the model parameter and…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-12 Jae Kwang Kim , Kosuke Morikawa

The unit selection problem aims to identify a set of individuals who are most likely to exhibit a desired mode of behavior, for example, selecting individuals who would respond one way if encouraged and a different way if not encouraged.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Ang Li , Judea Pearl