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Related papers: A primer on optimal transport for causal inference…

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Causal discovery is crucial for understanding complex systems and informing decisions. While observational data can uncover causal relationships under certain assumptions, it often falls short, making active interventions necessary. Current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yuxuan Wang , Mingzhou Liu , Xinwei Sun , Wei Wang , Yizhou Wang

Over the past two decades, considerable strides have been made in advancing neuroscientific techniques, yet challenges remain in attributing causality to observed associations. This review addresses a fundamental issue in observational…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-11-04 Eric W. Bridgeford , Brian S. Caffo , Maya B. Mathur , Russell A. Poldrack

This article presents a general approximation-theoretic framework to analyze measure transport algorithms for probabilistic modeling. A primary motivating application for such algorithms is sampling -- a central task in statistical…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Ricardo Baptista , Bamdad Hosseini , Nikola B. Kovachki , Youssef M. Marzouk , Amir Sagiv

Computational analysis of time-course data with an underlying causal structure is needed in a variety of domains, including neural spike trains, stock price movements, and gene expression levels. However, it can be challenging to determine…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Samantha Kleinberg , Bud Mishra

Optimal transport (OT) theory describes general principles to define and select, among many possible choices, the most efficient way to map a probability measure onto another. That theory has been mostly used to estimate, given a pair of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-03 Charlotte Bunne , Andreas Krause , Marco Cuturi

Missing data is a crucial issue when applying machine learning algorithms to real-world datasets. Starting from the simple assumption that two batches extracted randomly from the same dataset should share the same distribution, we leverage…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-02 Boris Muzellec , Julie Josse , Claire Boyer , Marco Cuturi

Optimal transport is a framework for comparing measures whereby a cost is incurred for transporting one measure to another. Recent works have aimed to improve optimal transport plans through the introduction of various forms of structure.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Fabian Lim , Laura Wynter , Shiau Hong Lim

Whether a variable is the cause of another, or simply associated with it, is often an important scientific question. Causal Inference is the name associated with the body of techniques for addressing that question in a statistical setting.…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-25 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

Optimal transport provides an inherently geometric and highly structured framework for studying spaces of probability measures, supplying a rich theoretical toolkit for contemporary statistics, machine learning, and generative modelling. In…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Riccardo Passeggeri , Rohan M. Shenoy , Pengcheng Ye

Causal inference is a study of causal relationships between events and the statistical study of inferring these relationships through interventions and other statistical techniques. Causal reasoning is any line of work toward determining…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-04-03 Patrick Chadbourne , Nasir Eisty

Optimal transport is a powerful framework for the efficient allocation of resources between sources and targets. However, traditional models often struggle to scale effectively in the presence of large and heterogeneous populations. In this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Navpreet Kaur , Juntao Chen , Yingdong Lu

In this paper, we present a novel and principled approach to learn the optimal transport between two distributions, from samples. Guided by the optimal transport theory, we learn the optimal Kantorovich potential which induces the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Ashok Vardhan Makkuva , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Sewoong Oh , Jason D. Lee

Causal inference is a central goal across many scientific disciplines. Over the past several decades, three major frameworks have emerged to formalize causal questions and guide their analysis: the potential outcomes framework, structural…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Linbo Wang , Thomas Richardson , James Robins

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

A fundamental challenge in causal inference with observational data is correct specification of a causal model. When there is model uncertainty, analysts may seek to use estimates from multiple candidate models that rely on distinct, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Rohit Bhattacharya , Ina Ocelli , Ted Westling

The fundamental challenge of drawing causal inference is that counterfactual outcomes are not fully observed for any unit. Furthermore, in observational studies, treatment assignment is likely to be confounded. Many statistical methods have…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-01 Harsh Parikh , Carlos Varjao , Louise Xu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Optimal transport (OT) is a versatile framework for comparing probability measures, with many applications to statistics, machine learning, and applied mathematics. However, OT distances suffer from computational and statistical scalability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-08 Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato , Gabriel Rioux , Ritwik Sadhu

Information geometry and optimal transport are two distinct geometric frameworks for modeling families of probability measures. During the recent years, there has been a surge of research endeavors that cut across these two areas and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-01 Gabriel Khan , Jun Zhang

In this paper, we study the optimal transport problem induced by separable cost functions. In this framework, transportation can be expressed as the composition of two lower-dimensional movements. Through this reformulation, we prove that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-18 Gennaro Auricchio

We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic statistical causality (DT), which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-28 A. Philip Dawid