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Related papers: How Balanced Should Causal Covariates Be?

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Ordering the expected outcomes across a collection of clusters after performing a covariate adjustment commonly arises in many applied settings, such as healthcare provider evaluation. Regression parameters in such covariate adjustment…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-21 Nicholas C. Henderson , Nicholas Hartman

In this paper, a Bayesian approach is developed for simultaneously comparing multiple experimental treatments with a common control treatment in an exploratory clinical trial. The sample size is set to ensure that, at the end of the study,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-14 John Whitehead , Faye Cleary , Amanda Turner

Covariate adjustment is an important tool in the analysis of randomized clinical trials and observational studies. It can be used to increase efficiency and thus power, and to reduce possible bias. While most statistical tests in randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2011-08-03 Xiaoru Wu , Zhiliang Ying

Covariate adjustment aims to improve the statistical efficiency of randomized trials by incorporating information from baseline covariates. Popular methods for covariate adjustment include analysis of covariance for continuous endpoints and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-09 Zhiwei Zhang , Ya Wang , Dong Xi

This position paper argues that, in debiased machine learning, balancing functions should be derived from the Neyman orthogonal score, not chosen only as functions of covariates. Covariate balancing is effective when the regression error…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-08 Masahiro Kato

We propose a Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) approach to causal inference using observational data consisting of outcome, treatment, and a set of confounders. The conditional distribution of the outcome given treatment and confounders is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-01 Yongseok Hur , Joonhyuk Jung , Juhee Lee

In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidance for adjustment of covariates in randomized clinical trials, emphasizing its role in enhancing precision and power through prognostic baseline variables. Despite its potential,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-28 Kelly Van Lancker , Iván Díaz , Stijn Vansteelandt

An essential goal of program evaluation and scientific research is the investigation of causal mechanisms. Over the past several decades, causal mediation analysis has been used in medical and social sciences to decompose the treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-01-15 K. C. G. Chan , K. Imai , S. C. P. Yam , Z. Zhang

In observational studies, the causal effect of a treatment may be confounded with variables that are related to both the treatment and the outcome of interest. In order to identify a causal effect, such studies often rely on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-17 Emma Persson , Jenny Häggström , Ingeborg Waernbaum , Xavier de Luna

Many major works in social science employ matching to make causal conclusions, but different matches on the same data may produce different treatment effect estimates, even when they achieve similar balance or minimize the same loss…

Applications · Statistics 2023-03-23 Marco Morucci , Cynthia Rudin

In observational studies, covariate imbalance generates confounding, resulting in biased comparisons. Although propensity score-based weighting approaches facilitate unconfounded group comparisons for implicit target populations, existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-03 Subharup Guha , David C. Christiani , Yi Li

Reliable uncertainty quantification is essential in survival prediction, particularly in clinical settings where erroneous decisions carry high risk. Conformal prediction has attracted substantial attention as it offers a model-agnostic…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-04 Jaeyoung Shin , Chi Hyun Lee , Sangwook Kang

Bayesian statistics has gained popularity in psychological research due to its intuitive uncertainty quantification and convenient information-updating rules. In many applications, however, prior distributions are introduced merely as…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Yang Liu , Jonathan P. Williams , Jan Hannig

While balancing covariates between groups is central for observational causal inference, selecting which features to balance remains a challenging problem. Kernel balancing is a promising approach that first estimates a kernel that captures…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-15 Andy A. Shen , Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller , Luke Keele , Jared Murray

Dealing with biased data samples is a common task across many statistical fields. In survey sampling, bias often occurs due to unrepresentative samples. In causal studies with observational data, the treated versus untreated group…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-29 Xiaojing Wang , Jingang Miao , Yunting Sun

A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariate strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-24 Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen , Andrew Ying , Yifan Cui , Xu Shi , Wang Miao

We establish concentration rates for estimation of treatment effects in experiments that incorporate prior sources of information -- such as past pilots, related studies, or expert assessments -- whose external validity is uncertain. Each…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-24 Frederico Finan , Demian Pouzo

Covariate adjustment can enhance precision and power in clinical trials, yet its application to the win odds remains unclear. The win odds is an extension of the win ratio that counts ties as half a win for the treatment and the control…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-08 Cyrill Scheidegger , Simon Wandel , Tobias Mütze

Neural networks make accurate predictions but often fail to provide reliable uncertainty estimates, especially under covariate distribution shifts between training and testing. To address this problem, we propose a Bayesian framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-22 Yuli Slavutsky , David M. Blei

Conformal prediction is a statistically rigorous method for quantifying uncertainty in models by having them output sets of predictions, with larger sets indicating more uncertainty. However, prediction sets are not inherently actionable;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Jesse C. Cresswell , Bhargava Kumar , Yi Sui , Mouloud Belbahri