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Confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret information in a way that aligns with one's preconceptions, can profoundly impact scientific research, leading to conclusions that reflect the researcher's hypotheses even when the observational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-09 Amnon Balanov , Tamir Bendory , Wasim Huleihel

A growing number of methods aim to assess the challenging question of treatment effect variation in observational studies. This special section of "Observational Studies" reports the results of a workshop conducted at the 2018 Atlantic…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-17 Carlos Carvalho , Avi Feller , Jared Murray , Spencer Woody , David Yeager

In this paper, we propose a data-adaptive empirical likelihood-based approach for treatment effect estimation and inference, which overcomes the obstacle of the traditional empirical likelihood-based approaches in the high-dimensional…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-15 Wei Liang , Ying Yan

Estimating the causal effect of a treatment or health policy with observational data can be challenging due to an imbalance of and a lack of overlap between treated and control covariate distributions. In the presence of limited overlap,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-24 Martha Barnard , Jared D. Huling , Julian Wolfson

Various methods have recently been proposed to estimate causal effects with confidence intervals that are uniformly valid over a set of data generating processes when high-dimensional nuisance models are estimated by post-model-selection or…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-07 Niloofar Moosavi , Tetiana Gorbach , Xavier de Luna

Estimating causal effects from observational data is inherently challenging due to the lack of observable counterfactual outcomes and even the presence of unmeasured confounding. Traditional methods often rely on restrictive, untestable…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-07 Li Chen , Xiaotong Shen , Wei Pan

The widely used 'Counterfactual' definition of Causal Effects was derived for unbiasedness and accuracy - and not generalizability. We propose a Combinatorial definition for the External Validity (EV) of intervention effects. We first…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-18 Andre F. Ribeiro

While observational data are routinely used to estimate causal effects of biomedical treatments, doing so requires special methods to adjust for observed confounding. These methods invariably rely on untestable statistical and causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-02 Arman Oganisian

Estimating causal effects from observational data informs us about which factors are important in an autonomous system, and enables us to take better decisions. This is important because it has applications in selecting a treatment in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Plabon Shaha , Talha Islam Zadid , Ismat Rahman , Md. Mosaddek Khan

Randomized trials are widely considered as the gold standard for evaluating the effects of decision policies. Trial data is, however, drawn from a population which may differ from the intended target population and this raises a problem of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-30 Sofia Ek , Dave Zachariah

Matching and weighting methods for observational studies involve the choice of an estimand, the causal effect with reference to a specific target population. Commonly used estimands include the average treatment effect in the treated (ATT),…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-12 Noah Greifer , Elizabeth A. Stuart

Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

Causal inference is a critical research area with multi-disciplinary origins and applications, ranging from statistics, computer science, economics, psychology to public health. In many scientific research, randomized experiments provide a…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-26 Jingying Zeng

While many areas of machine learning have benefited from the increasing availability of large and varied datasets, the benefit to causal inference has been limited given the strong assumptions needed to ensure identifiability of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-02 Wenshuo Guo , Serena Wang , Peng Ding , Yixin Wang , Michael I. Jordan

In causal inference, it is common to estimate the causal effect of a single treatment variable on an outcome. However, practitioners may also be interested in the effect of simultaneous interventions on multiple covariates of a fixed target…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-24 Jaime Roquero Gimenez , Dominik Rothenhäusler

We consider the problem of constructing confidence intervals for nonparametric functional data analysis using empirical likelihood. In this doubly infinite-dimensional context, we demonstrate the Wilks's phenomenon and propose a…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-04-07 Heng Lian

Causal inference relies on the untestable assumption of no unmeasured confounding. Sensitivity analysis can be used to quantify the impact of unmeasured confounding on causal estimates. Among sensitivity analysis methods proposed in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-12 Yushu Zou , Liangyuan Hu , Amanda Ricciuto , Mark Deneau , Kuan Liu

This paper introduces a new framework for recovering causal graphs from observational data, leveraging the observation that the distribution of an effect, conditioned on its causes, remains invariant to changes in the prior distribution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Nang Hung Nguyen , Phi Le Nguyen , Thao Nguyen Truong , Trong Nghia Hoang , Masashi Sugiyama

In observational studies of treatment effects, estimates may be biased by unmeasured confounders, which can potentially affect the validity of the results. Understanding sensitivity to such biases helps assess how unmeasured confounding…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-02 Qishuo Yin , Dylan S. Small

Model selection aims to identify a sufficiently well performing model that is possibly simpler than the most complex model among a pool of candidates. However, the decision-making process itself can inadvertently introduce non-negligible…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-08 Yann McLatchie , Aki Vehtari