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Causal inference, estimating causal effects from observational data, is a fundamental tool in many disciplines. Of particular importance across a variety of domains is the continuous treatment setting, where the variable of intervention has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Christopher Stith , Medha Barath , Vahid Balazadeh , Jesse C. Cresswell , Rahul G. Krishnan

Despite the major advances taken in causal modeling, causality is still an unfamiliar topic for many statisticians. In this paper, it is demonstrated from the beginning to the end how causal effects can be estimated from observational data…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-07-03 Juha Karvanen

Causal machine learning tools are beginning to see use in real-world policy evaluation tasks to flexibly estimate treatment effects. One issue with these methods is that the machine learning models used are generally black boxes, i.e.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Patrick Rehill , Nicholas Biddle

This paper provides a critical review of the Bayesian perspective of causal inference based on the potential outcomes framework. We review the causal estimands, identification assumptions, the general structure of Bayesian inference of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-25 Fan Li , Peng Ding , Fabrizia Mealli

Policies trained via reinforcement learning (RL) are often very complex even for simple tasks. In an episode with $n$ time steps, a policy will make $n$ decisions on actions to take, many of which may appear non-intuitive to the observer.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Daniel McNamee , Hana Chockler

Causal inference is central to scientific discovery, yet choosing appropriate methods remains challenging because of the complexity of both statistical methodology and real-world data. Inspired by the success of artificial intelligence in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Can Wang , Hongyu Zhao , Yiqun Chen

We formulate a causal extension to the recently introduced paradigm of instance-wise feature selection to explain black-box visual classifiers. Our method selects a subset of input features that has the greatest causal effect on the models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Pranoy Panda , Sai Srinivas Kancheti , Vineeth N Balasubramanian

Causal inference methods such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-differences are widely used to identify and estimate treatment effects. However, when outcomes are qualitative, their application poses…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-30 Riccardo Di Francesco , Giovanni Mellace

Machine learning models have had discernible achievements in a myriad of applications. However, most of these models are black-boxes, and it is obscure how the decisions are made by them. This makes the models unreliable and untrustworthy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-23 Raha Moraffah , Mansooreh Karami , Ruocheng Guo , Adrienne Raglin , Huan Liu

To draw scientifically meaningful conclusions and build reliable models of quantitative phenomena, cause and effect must be taken into consideration (either implicitly or explicitly). This is particularly challenging when the measurements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Max A. Little , Reham Badawy

ML is playing an increasingly crucial role in estimating causal effects of treatments on outcomes from observational data. Many ML methods (`causal estimators') have been proposed for this task. All of these methods, as with any ML…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Damian Machlanski , Spyridon Samothrakis , Paul Clarke

In biomedical research, repeated measurements within each subject are often processed to remove artifacts and unwanted sources of variation. The resulting data are used to construct derived outcomes that act as proxies for scientific…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Zihang Wang , Razieh Nabi , Benjamin B. Risk

This paper develops a Bayesian framework for robust causal inference from longitudinal observational data. Many contemporary methods rely on structural assumptions, such as factor models, to adjust for unobserved confounding, but they can…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-20 Angelos Alexopoulos , Nikolaos Demiris

Estimating causal effects from large experimental and observational data has become increasingly prevalent in both industry and research. The bootstrap is an intuitive and powerful technique used to construct standard errors and confidence…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-07 Matthew Kosko , Lin Wang , Michele Santacatterina

In social sciences and economics, causal inference traditionally focuses on assessing the impact of predefined treatments (or interventions) on predefined outcomes, such as the effect of education programs on earnings. Causal discovery, in…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-12 Martin Huber

Causal inference deals with identifying which random variables "cause" or control other random variables. Recent advances on the topic of causal inference based on tools from statistical estimation and machine learning have resulted in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-23 Matt J. Kusner , Yu Sun , Karthik Sridharan , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Causal inference is widely used in various fields, such as biology, psychology and economics, etc. In observational studies, we need to balance the covariates before estimating causal effect. This study extends the one-dimensional entropy…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-19 Juan Chen , Yingchun Zhou

The era of big data has witnessed an increasing availability of observational data from mobile and social networking, online advertising, web mining, healthcare, education, public policy, marketing campaigns, and so on, which facilitates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Zhixuan Chu , Ruopeng Li , Stephen Rathbun , Sheng Li

Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Sepehr Elahi , Sina Akbari , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash , Patrick Thiran

We address the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding, a setting where both treatment assignment and observed outcomes of individuals may be influenced by their neighbors within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Abhishek Dalvi , Neil Ashtekar , Vasant Honavar