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Related papers: Distributional Instrumental Variable Method

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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

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

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 variables are a popular study design for the estimation of treatment effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. In the canonical instrumental variables design, the instrument is a binary variable. In many settings,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-10 Prabrisha Rakshit , Alexander Levis , Luke Keele

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

This paper concerns the assessment of direct causal effects from a combination of: (i) non-experimental data, and (ii) qualitative domain knowledge. Domain knowledge is encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), in which all…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Carlos Brito , Judea Pearl

In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Antti Pöllänen , Pekka Marttinen

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

Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-30 M. Usaid Awan , Yameng Liu , Marco Morucci , Sudeepa Roy , Cynthia Rudin , Alexander Volfovsky

Instrumental variable regression is a common approach for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, identifying valid instruments is often difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-22 Gregor Steiner , Jeremie Houssineau , Mark F. J. Steel

Despite having achieved great success for sentiment analysis, existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis. This may be due to the fact that they may latch onto spurious correlations ("shortcuts", e.g., focusing only on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Siyin Wang , Jie Zhou , Changzhi Sun , Junjie Ye , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Traditional instrumental variable (IV) estimators face a fundamental constraint: they can only accommodate as many endogenous treatment variables as available instruments. This limitation becomes particularly challenging in settings where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shiangyi Lin , Hui Lan , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Instrumental variable analysis is a widely used method to estimate causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. When the instruments, exposure and outcome are not measured in the same sample, Angrist and Krueger (1992)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-09-07 Qingyuan Zhao , Jingshu Wang , Jack Bowden , Dylan S. Small

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

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 2016-07-14 Hyunseung Kang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

Instrumental variables (IV) regression is a popular method for the estimation of the endogenous treatment effects. Conventional IV methods require all the instruments are relevant and valid. However, this is impractical especially in…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-06-29 Qingliang Fan , Yaqian Wu

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-25 Carlos García Meixide , Mark J. van der Laan

Instrumental Variable (IV) provides a source of treatment randomization that is conditionally independent of the outcomes, responding to the challenges of counterfactual and confounding biases. In finance, IV construction typically relies…

General Economics · Economics 2024-11-27 Ying Chen , Ziwei Xu , Kotaro Inoue , Ryutaro Ichise

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

Causal inference is to estimate the causal effect in a causal relationship when intervention is applied. Precisely, in a causal model with binary interventions, i.e., control and treatment, the causal effect is simply the difference between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Zhenyu Lu , Yurong Cheng , Mingjun Zhong , George Stoian , Ye Yuan , Guoren Wang