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Instrumental variable methods provide a powerful approach to estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. But a key challenge when applying them is the reliance on untestable "exclusion" assumptions that rule out any…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-23 Jason Hartford , Victor Veitch , Dhanya Sridhar , Kevin Leyton-Brown

Instrumental variables (IVs) are often continuous, arising in diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Existing approaches for continuous IVs typically impose strong parametric models or assume homogeneous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Mei Dong , Lin Liu , Dingke Tang , Geoffrey Liu , Wei Xu , Linbo Wang

Studies in environmental and epidemiological sciences are often spatially varying and observational in nature with the aim of establishing cause and effect relationships. One of the major challenges with such studies is the presence of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-16 Sayli Pokal , Yawen Guan , Honglang Wang , Yuzhen Zhou

The use of instrumental variables for estimating the effect of an exposure on an outcome is popular in econometrics, and increasingly so in epidemiology. This increasing popularity may be attributed to the natural occurrence of instrumental…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-03 T. Martinussen , S. Vansteelandt , E. J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , D. M. Zucker

We address the problem of inferring the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome across space, using observational data. The data is possibly subject to unmeasured confounding variables which, in a standard approach, must be adjusted for…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-04 Muhammad Osama , Dave Zachariah , Thomas B. Schön

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to study the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome in the presence of unmeasured confounding. IVs require an instrument, a variable that is (A1) associated with the exposure, (A2) has no…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-30 Hyunseung Kang , Zijian Guo , Zhonghua Liu , Dylan Small

Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular and powerful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, classical approaches rely on strong assumptions such as the $\textit{exclusion criterion}$, which…

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to infer treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we study nonparametric inference with an IV under a separable binary treatment choice model, which…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Chan Park , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

The instrumental variables (IV) method is a method for making causal inferences about the effect of a treatment based on an observational study in which there are unmeasured confounding variables. The method requires a valid IV, a variable…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-08-19 Dylan Small , Zhiqiang Tan , Scott Lorch , Alan Brookhart

To reach human level intelligence, learning algorithms need to incorporate causal reasoning. But identifying causality, and particularly counterfactual reasoning, remains elusive. In this paper, we make progress on counterfactual inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Marc Braun , Jose M. Peña , Adel Daoud

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

A key challenge in environmental health research is unmeasured spatial confounding, driven by unobserved spatially structured variables that influence both treatment and outcome. A common approach is to fit a spatial regression that models…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-23 Sophie M. Woodward , Francesca Dominici , Jose R. Zubizarreta

Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu

Causal inference in spatial domains faces two intertwined challenges: (1) unmeasured spatial factors, such as weather, air pollution, or mobility, that confound treatment and outcome, and (2) interference from nearby treatments that violate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Ayush Khot , Miruna Oprescu , Maresa Schröder , Ai Kagawa , Xihaier Luo

For settings with a binary treatment and a binary outcome, instrumental variables can be used to construct bounds on a causal treatment effect. With continuous outcomes, meaningful bounds are more difficult to obtain because the domain of…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-03-26 Tao Liu , Joseph W. Hogan

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

The instrumental-variables (IV) setting is standard for partial identification of causal effects when unobserved confounding makes point identification impossible. Existing approaches face methodological bottlenecks: closed-form bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Vahid Balazadeh , Hamidreza Kamkari , Medha Barath , Ricardo Silva , Rahul G. Krishnan

Instrumental variable methods provide useful tools for inferring causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To apply these methods with large-scale data sets, a major challenge is to find valid instruments from a possibly…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-24 Xinyi Zhang , Linbo Wang , Stanislav Volgushev , Dehan Kong

This paper studies the cumulative causal effects of sequential treatments in the presence of unmeasured confounders. It is a critical issue in sequential decision-making scenarios where treatment decisions and outcomes dynamically evolve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Yingrong Wang , Anpeng Wu , Baohong Li , Ziyang Xiao , Ruoxuan Xiong , Qing Han , Kun Kuang

Instrumental variables have been widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. Existing confidence intervals for causal effects based on instrumental variables assume that all of the putative instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-03 Hyunseung Kang , Youjin Lee , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small