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Related papers: Causal Inference for Qualitative Outcomes

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In contrast to problems of interference in (exogenous) treatments, models of interference in unit-specific (endogenous) outcomes do not usually produce a reduced-form representation where outcomes depend on other units' treatment status…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-17 Konrad Menzel

Doubly robust learning offers a robust framework for causal inference from observational data by integrating propensity score and outcome modeling. Despite its theoretical appeal, practical adoption remains limited due to perceived…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-09 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson

Modern machine learning (ML) methods typically fail to adequately capture causal information. Consequently, such models do not handle data distributional shifts, are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and often learn spurious correlations.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-27 Rishi Goel , Casey R. Myers , Sally Shrapnel

Partial identification approaches are a flexible and robust alternative to standard point-identification approaches in general instrumental variable models. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of a ``curse of cardinality'': the…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-06-30 Florian Gunsilius

Improving public policy is one of the key roles of governments, and they can do this in an evidence-based way using administrative data. Causal inference for observational data improves on current practice of using descriptive or predictive…

Applications · Statistics 2023-01-18 Elena Tartaglia , Peter Rankin

The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-31 Dustin Tran , Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Susan Athey , David M. Blei

This paper introduces a collection of four data sets, similar to Anscombe's Quartet, that aim to highlight the challenges involved when estimating causal effects. Each of the four data sets is generated based on a distinct causal mechanism:…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-20 Lucy D'Agostino McGowan , Travis Gerke , Malcolm Barrett

Understanding the factors that trigger or prevent undesirable health outcomes across patient subpopulations is essential for designing targeted interventions. While randomized controlled trials and expert-led patient interviews are standard…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shishir Adhikari , Guido Muscioni , Mark Shapiro , Plamen Petrov , Elena Zheleva

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

Causal Inference offers a fundamental approach for advancing empirical software engineering (ESE) beyond traditional statistical association, enabling researchers to rigorously identify and quantify causal relationships in software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas , Aya Garryyeva , David Nader Palacio , Antonio Mastropaolo , Denys Poshyvanyk

Causal effect identification considers whether an interventional probability distribution can be uniquely determined without parametric assumptions from measured source distributions and structural knowledge on the generating system. While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-30 Santtu Tikka , Antti Hyttinen , Juha Karvanen

Due to unmeasured confounding, it is often not possible to identify causal effects from a postulated model. Nevertheless, we can ask for partial identification, which usually boils down to finding upper and lower bounds of a causal quantity…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Jakob Zeitler , Ricardo Silva

We study causal inference in a multi-environment setting, in which the functional relations for producing the variables from their direct causes remain the same across environments, while the distribution of exogenous noises may vary. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-29 AmirEmad Ghassami , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Kun Zhang

Many proposals for the identification of causal effects require an instrumental variable that satisfies strong, untestable unconfoundedness and exclusion restriction assumptions. In this paper, we show how one can potentially identify…

Causal inference with observational data critically relies on untestable and extra-statistical assumptions that have (sometimes) testable implications. Well-known sets of assumptions that are sufficient to justify the causal interpretation…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-20 Pablo Geraldo Bastías

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

Unobserved confounding presents a major threat to causal inference from observational studies. Recently, several authors suggest that this problem may be overcome in a shared confounding setting where multiple treatments are independent…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-25 Dehan Kong , Shu Yang , Linbo Wang

Causal discovery aims to learn causal relationships between variables from targeted data, making it a fundamental task in machine learning. However, causal discovery algorithms often rely on unverifiable causal assumptions, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Huiyang Yi , Yanyan He , Duxin Chen , Mingyu Kang , He Wang , Wenwu Yu

A further understanding of cause and effect within observational data is critical across many domains, such as economics, health care, public policy, web mining, online advertising, and marketing campaigns. Although significant advances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Zhixuan Chu , Sheng Li

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are used to estimate causal effects in settings with unobserved confounding, where we cannot directly experiment on the treatment variable. Instruments are variables which only affect the outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-26 Elisabeth Ailer , Jason Hartford , Niki Kilbertus