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Related papers: How Balanced Should Causal Covariates Be?

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Bayesian optimization is a coherent, ubiquitous approach to decision-making under uncertainty, with applications including multi-arm bandits, active learning, and black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization selects decisions (i.e.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Samuel Stanton , Wesley Maddox , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

In observational studies, the propensity score plays a central role in estimating causal effects of interest. The inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimator is commonly used for this purpose. However, if the propensity score model is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-21 Shunichiro Orihara , Tomotaka Momozaki , Tomoyuki Nakagawa

In this paper, we propose a robust method to estimate the average treatment effects in observational studies when the number of potential confounders is possibly much greater than the sample size. We first use a class of penalized…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-21 Yang Ning , Sida Peng , Kosuke Imai

The discovery of causal relationships is a foundational problem in artificial intelligence, statistics, epidemiology, economics, and beyond. While elegant theories exist for accurate causal discovery given infinite data, real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-28 Mian Wei , Somesh Jha , David Page

Conservative inference is a major concern in simulation-based inference. It has been shown that commonly used algorithms can produce overconfident posterior approximations. Balancing has empirically proven to be an effective way to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Arnaud Delaunoy , Benjamin Kurt Miller , Patrick Forré , Christoph Weniger , Gilles Louppe

We consider the conditional randomization test as a way to account for covariate imbalance in randomized experiments. The test accounts for covariate imbalance by comparing the observed test statistic to the null distribution of the test…

Estimating causal effects from observational data is challenging due to selection bias, which leads to imbalanced covariate distributions across treatment groups. Propensity score-based weighting methods are widely used to address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Ahmad Saeed Khan , Erik Schaffernicht , Johannes Andreas Stork

Eliminating the effect of confounding in observational studies typically involves fitting a model for an outcome adjusted for covariates. When, as often, these covariates are high-dimensional, this necessitates the use of sparse estimators…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-03-26 Oliver Dukes , Stijn Vansteelandt

Sensitivity analysis informs causal inference by assessing the sensitivity of conclusions to departures from assumptions. The consistency assumption states that there are no hidden versions of treatment and that the outcome arising…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-29 Brian Knaeble , Qinyun Lin , Erich Kummerfeld , Kenneth A. Frank

Unlike classification, whose goal is to estimate the class of each data point in a dataset, prevalence estimation or quantification is a task that aims to estimate the distribution of classes in a dataset. The two main tasks in prevalence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Aime Bienfait Igiraneza , Christophe Fraser , Robert Hinch

In paired randomized experiments individuals in a given matched pair may differ on prognostically important covariates despite the best efforts of practitioners. We examine the use of regression adjustment as a way to correct for persistent…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-11-27 Colin B. Fogarty

Traditional methods for covariate adjustment of treatment means in designed experiments are inherently conditional on the observed covariate values. In order to develop a coherent general methodology for analysis of covariance, we propose a…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-01-19 James G. Booth , Walter T. Federer , Martin T. Wells , Russell D. Wolfinger

A fundamental problem in statistics is to compare the outcomes attained by members of subpopulations. This problem arises in the analysis of randomized controlled trials, in the analysis of A/B tests, and in the assessment of fairness and…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-02 Mark Tygert

Causal inference is capable of estimating the treatment effect (i.e., the causal effect of treatment on the outcome) to benefit the decision making in various domains. One fundamental challenge in this research is that the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Qian Li , Zhichao Wang , Shaowu Liu , Gang Li , Guandong Xu

Some units from a population receive the same treatment that is different from treatments available for other reservoir populations. The minimal sufficient statistic $s$ for the pre-treatment $x$-covariates's distributions in the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-08-05 Yannis G. Yatracos

The focus of this paper is on quantifying the capacity of covariates in devising efficient treatment rules when data from a randomized trial are available. Conventional one-variable-at-a-time subgroup analysis based on statistical…

Applications · Statistics 2020-02-04 Mohsen Sadatsafavi , Mohammad Mansournia , Paul Gustafson

Propensity scores are commonly used to estimate treatment effects from observational data. We argue that the probabilistic output of a learned propensity score model should be calibrated -- i.e., a predictive treatment probability of 90%…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-06 Shachi Deshpande , Volodymyr Kuleshov

There has been a growing interest in covariate adjustment in the analysis of randomized controlled trials in past years. For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently issued guidance that emphasizes the importance of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-12 Kelly Van Lancker , Frank Bretz , Oliver Dukes

We study the problem of selecting covariates for unbiased estimation of the total causal effect.Existing approaches typically rely on global causal structure learning over all variables, or on strong assumptions such as causal sufficiency -…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Zeyu Liu , Zheng Li , Feng Xie , Yan Zeng , Hao Zhang , Kun Zhang