Related papers: Local Interference: Removing Interference Bias in …
Mediation analysis in causal inference has traditionally focused on binary exposures and deterministic interventions, and a decomposition of the average treatment effect in terms of direct and indirect effects. In this paper we present an…
Instrumental variable methods have been widely used to identify causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. A key identification condition known as the exclusion restriction states that the instrument cannot have a direct…
Skepticism about the assumption of no unmeasured confounding, also known as exchangeability, is often warranted in making causal inferences from observational data; because exchangeability hinges on an investigator's ability to accurately…
A fundamental challenge of scientific research is inferring causal relations based on observed data. One commonly used approach involves utilizing structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among interacting…
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…
The discovery of discriminatory bias in human or automated decision making is a task of increasing importance and difficulty, exacerbated by the pervasive use of machine learning and data mining. Currently, discrimination discovery largely…
Causal inference is a vital aspect of multiple scientific disciplines and is routinely applied to high-impact applications such as medicine. However, evaluating the performance of causal inference methods in real-world environments is…
Additive noise models (ANMs) are an important setting studied in causal inference. Most of the existing works on ANMs assume causal sufficiency, i.e., there are no unobserved confounders. This paper focuses on confounded ANMs, where a set…
In randomized controlled trials without interference, regression adjustment is widely used to enhance the efficiency of treatment effect estimation. This paper extends this efficiency principle to settings with network interference, where a…
One fundamental statistical question for research areas such as precision medicine and health disparity is about discovering effect modification of treatment or exposure by observed covariates. We propose a semiparametric framework for…
Behavioral cloning reduces policy learning to supervised learning by training a discriminative model to predict expert actions given observations. Such discriminative models are non-causal: the training procedure is unaware of the causal…
The assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (iid) is standard in many areas of statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, in some settings, such as social networks, infectious disease modeling, and…
We propose a definition for the average indirect effect of a binary treatment in the potential outcomes model for causal inference under cross-unit interference. Our definition is analogous to the standard definition of the average direct…
Evaluating the causal effect of an intervention on multivariate outcomes is challenging when the outcomes are interdependent and derived rather than directly observed. Effective connectivity, which summarizes the directional neural…
Fair machine learning aims to prevent discrimination against individuals or sub-populations based on sensitive attributes such as gender and race. In recent years, causal inference methods have been increasingly used in fair machine…
The term "interference" has been used to describe any setting in which one subject's exposure may affect another subject's outcome. We use causal diagrams to distinguish among three causal mechanisms that give rise to interference. The…
Causal evidence is needed to act and it is often enough for the evidence to point towards a direction of the effect of an action. For example, policymakers might be interested in estimating the effect of slightly increasing taxes on private…
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…
This dissertation focuses on modern causal inference under uncertainty and data restrictions, with applications to neoadjuvant clinical trials, distributed data networks, and robust individualized decision making. In the first project, we…
It is common in medical studies that the outcome of interest is truncated by death, meaning that a subject has died before the outcome could be measured. In this case, restricted analysis among survivors may be subject to selection bias.…