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We provide a new flexible framework for inference with the instrumental variable model. Rather than using linear specifications, functions characterizing the effects of instruments and other explanatory variables are estimated using machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-03 Robert E. McCulloch , Rodney A. Sparapani , Brent R. Logan , Purushottam W. Laud

Indirect experiments provide a valuable framework for estimating treatment effects in situations where conducting randomized control trials (RCTs) is impractical or unethical. Unlike RCTs, indirect experiments estimate treatment effects by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Emma Brunskill

Instrumental variable (IV) strategies are widely used in political science to establish causal relationships. However, the identifying assumptions required by an IV design are demanding, and it remains challenging for researchers to assess…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-08 Apoorva Lal , Mac Lockhart , Yiqing Xu , Ziwen Zu

Instrumental variables are a popular tool to infer causal effects under unobserved confounding, but choosing suitable instruments is challenging in practice. We propose gIVBMA, a Bayesian model averaging procedure that addresses this…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-02 Gregor Steiner , Mark Steel

Models with a discrete endogenous variable are typically underidentified when the instrument takes on too few values. This paper presents a new method that matches pairs of covariates and instruments to restore point identification in this…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-07-28 Junlong Feng

Time-to-event analyses are often plagued by both -- possibly unmeasured -- confounding and competing risks. To deal with the former, the use of instrumental variables for effect estimation is rapidly gaining ground. We show how to make use…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-04 Torben Martinussen , Stijn Vansteelandt

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

This paper studies the partial identification of treatment effects in Instrumental Variables (IV) settings with binary outcomes under violations of independence. I derive the identified sets for the treatment parameters of interest in the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-03 Pedro Picchetti

Consider the problem of estimating the local average treatment effect with an instrument variable, where the instrument unconfoundedness holds after adjusting for a set of measured covariates. Several unknown functions of the covariates…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-22 Baoluo Sun , Zhiqiang Tan

We address the problem of causal effect estimation in the presence of hidden confounders, using nonparametric instrumental variable (IV) regression. A leading strategy employs spectral features - that is, learned features spanning the top…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-27 Dimitri Meunier , Antoine Moulin , Jakub Wornbard , Vladimir R. Kostic , Arthur Gretton

Instrumental variable (IV) methods allow us the opportunity to address unmeasured confounding in causal inference. However, most IV methods are only applicable to discrete or continuous outcomes with very few IV methods for censored…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-30 Youjin Lee , Edward H. Kennedy , Nandita Mitra

Scientific and business practices are increasingly resulting in large collections of randomized experiments. Analyzed together, these collections can tell us things that individual experiments in the collection cannot. We study how to learn…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-02 Alexander Peysakhovich , Dean Eckles

We introduce a new instrumental variable (IV) estimator for heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of endogeneity. Our estimator is based on double/debiased machine learning (DML) and uses efficient machine learning instruments…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-06 Cyrill Scheidegger , Zijian Guo , Peter Bühlmann

In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Antti Pöllänen , Pekka Marttinen

Instrumental variables are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. The discrete instrumental variable model has testable implications on the law of the observed data. However, current assessments…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-11-22 Linbo Wang , James M. Robins , Thomas S. Richardson

This note deals with a class of variables that, if conditioned on, tends to amplify confounding bias in the analysis of causal effects. This class, independently discovered by Bhattacharya and Vogt (2007) and Wooldridge (2009), includes…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-03-19 Judea Pearl

This note presents a proof of the conjecture in \citet*{pearl1995testability} about testing the validity of an instrumental variable in hidden variable models. It implies that instrument validity cannot be tested in the case where the…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-11-30 Florian Gunsilius

We discuss the fundamental issue of identification in linear instrumental variable (IV) models with unknown IV validity. With the assumption of the "sparsest rule", which is equivalent to the plurality rule but becomes operational in…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-06 Yiqi Lin , Frank Windmeijer , Xinyuan Song , Qingliang Fan

Unobserved confounding is the main obstacle to causal effect estimation from observational data. Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for causal effect estimation when there exist latent confounders. With the standard IV method,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Thuc duy Le , Jixue Liu

This paper studies the identifying power of an instrumental variable in the nonparametric heterogeneous treatment effect framework when a binary treatment is mismeasured and endogenous. Using a binary instrumental variable, I characterize…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-05-22 Takuya Ura