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Unobserved spatial confounding variables are prevalent in environmental and ecological applications where the system under study is complex and the data are often observational. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a common way to address…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-02 Andrew Giffin , Brian J. Reich , Shu Yang , Ana G. Rappold

Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

When an exposure of interest is confounded by unmeasured factors, an instrumental variable (IV) can be used to identify and estimate certain causal contrasts. Identification of the marginal average treatment effect (ATE) from IVs relies on…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-02 Alexander W. Levis , Matteo Bonvini , Zhenghao Zeng , Luke Keele , Edward H. Kennedy

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Felix Schur , Niklas Pfister , Peng Ding , Sach Mukherjee , Jonas Peters

In many observational studies, researchers are often interested in studying the effects of multiple exposures on a single outcome. Standard approaches for high-dimensional data such as the lasso assume the associations between the exposures…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-06 Dingke Tang , Dehan Kong , Linbo Wang

Instrumental variables (IVs) are crucial for addressing unobservable confounders, yet their stringent exogeneity assumptions pose significant challenges in networked data. Existing methods typically rely on modelling neighbour information…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhirong Huang , Debo Cheng , Guixian Zhang , Yi Wang , Jiuyong Li , Shichao Zhang

Can instrumental variables be found from data? While instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to identify causal effect, testing their validity from observed data remains a challenge. This is because validity of an IV depends on…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-05 Amit Sharma

Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-10 Ricardo Silva , Shohei Shimizu

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

Instrumental variables (IVs) provide a powerful strategy for identifying causal effects in the presence of unobservable confounders. Within the nonparametric setting (NPIV), recent methods have been based on nonlinear generalizations of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Yuri Fonseca , Caio Peixoto , Yuri Saporito

The instrumental variable (IV) design is a common approach to address hidden confounding bias. For validity, an IV must impact the outcome only through its association with the treatment. In addition, IV identification has required a…

Instrumental variables (IV) are often used to identify causal effects in observational settings and experiments subject to non-compliance. Under canonical assumptions, IVs allow us to identify a so-called local average treatment effect…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-03 Luca Locher , Mats J. Stensrud , Aaron L. Sarvet

Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Danielle Tsao , Krikamol Muandet , Frederick Eberhardt , Emilija Perković

Instrumental variables allow for quantification of cause and effect relationships even in the absence of interventions. To achieve this, a number of causal assumptions must be met, the most important of which is the independence assumption,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-05 Nikolai Miklin , Mariami Gachechiladze , George Moreno , Rafael Chaves

Nonlinear causal effects are prevalent in many research scenarios involving continuous exposures, and instrumental variables (IVs) can be employed to investigate such effects, particularly in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-29 Haodong Tian , Ashish Patel , Stephen Burgess

We study categorical instrumental variable (IV) models with instrument, treatment, and outcome taking finitely many values. We derive a simple closed-form characterization of the set of joint distributions of potential outcomes that are…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-13 Yilin Song , F. Richard Guo , K. C. Gary Chan , Thomas S. Richardson

The technique of data augmentation (DA) is often used in machine learning for regularization purposes to better generalize under i.i.d. settings. In this work, we present a unifying framework with topics in causal inference to make a case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Uzair Akbar , Niki Kilbertus , Hao Shen , Krikamol Muandet , Bo Dai

Causal inference methods are gaining increasing prominence in pharmaceutical drug development in light of the recently published addendum on estimands and sensitivity analysis in clinical trials to the E9 guideline of the International…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-30 Jack Bowden , Bjoern Bornkamp , Ekkehard Glimm , Frank Bretz

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Cox's proportional hazards model is one of the most popular statistical models to evaluate associations of exposure with a censored failure time outcome. When confounding factors are not fully observed, the exposure hazard ratio estimated…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-01-04 Linbo Wang , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen , Torben Martinussen , Stijn Vansteelandt