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Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) from observational data is relevant in many fields such as personalized medicine. However, in practice, the treatment assignment is usually confounded by unobserved variables and thus…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-24 Dennis Frauen , Stefan Feuerriegel

Observational studies can play a useful role in assessing the comparative effectiveness of competing treatments. In a clinical trial the randomization of participants to treatment and control groups generally results in well-balanced groups…

Latent confounders are a fundamental challenge for inferring causal effects from observational data. The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a practical way to address this challenge. Existing IV based estimators need a known IV or other…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Ziqi Xu , Weijia Zhang , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Drawing causal inference with observational studies is the central pillar of many disciplines. One sufficient condition for identifying the causal effect is that the treatment-outcome relationship is unconfounded conditional on the observed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-01-17 Peng Ding , Tyler VanderWeele , James Robins

Instrumental variables have been widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. Existing confidence intervals for causal effects based on instrumental variables assume that all of the putative instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-03 Hyunseung Kang , Youjin Lee , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

The technique of data augmentation (DA) is often used in machine learning for regularization purposes to better generalize under i.i.d. settings. In this work, we present a unifying framework with topics in causal inference to make a case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Uzair Akbar , Niki Kilbertus , Hao Shen , Krikamol Muandet , Bo Dai

Unlike other techniques of causality inference, the use of valid instrumental variables can deal with unobserved sources of both variable errors, variable omissions, and sampling bias, and still arrive at consistent estimates of average…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-02-17 Øyvind Hoveid

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Inference for causal effects can benefit from the availability of an instrumental variable (IV) which, by definition, is associated with the given exposure, but not with the outcome of interest other than through a causal exposure effect.…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-01-13 Stijn Vansteelandt , Jack Bowden , Manoochehr Babanezhad , Els Goetghebeur

Instrumental variable methods are among the most commonly used causal inference approaches to deal with unmeasured confounders in observational studies. The presence of invalid instruments is the primary concern for practical applications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-18 Zijian Guo

Learning a causal effect from observational data is not straightforward, as this is not possible without further assumptions. If hidden common causes between treatment $X$ and outcome $Y$ cannot be blocked by other measurements, one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-10 Ricardo Silva , Shohei Shimizu

We address the issue of the testability of instrumental variables derived from observational data. Most existing testable implications are centered on scenarios where the treatment is a discrete variable, e.g., instrumental inequality…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-13 Xichen Guo , Zheng Li , Biwei Huang , Yan Zeng , Zhi Geng , Feng Xie

Instrumental variables have been widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome. Existing confidence intervals for causal effects based on instrumental variables assume that all of the putative instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-07-14 Hyunseung Kang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

In observational studies, instrumental variable (IV) methods are commonly applied when there exists some unmeasured covariates. In Mendelian Randomization (MR), constructing an allele score by using many single nucleotide polymorphisms…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-22 Shunichiro Orihara

Causal inference from longitudinal observational data is a challenging problem due to the difficulty in correctly identifying the time-dependent confounders, especially in the presence of latent time-dependent confounders. Instrumental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Wentao Gao , Thuc Duy Le

Causal inference is difficult in the presence of unobserved confounders. We introduce the instrumented common confounding (ICC) approach to (nonparametrically) identify causal effects with instruments, which are exogenous only conditional…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-09-20 Christian Tien

For linear regression models who are not exactly sparse in the sense that the coefficients of the insignificant variables are not exactly zero, the working models obtained by a variable selection are often biased. Even in sparse cases,…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-07-17 Lu Lin , Lixing Zhu , Yujie Gai

This paper discusses estimation with a categorical instrumental variable in settings with potentially few observations per category. The proposed categorical instrumental variable estimator (CIV) leverages a regularization assumption that…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-05-27 Thomas Wiemann

Instrumental variables are commonly used to estimate effects of a treatment afflicted by unmeasured confounding, and in practice instruments are often continuous (e.g., measures of distance, or treatment preference). However, available…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-05 Edward H. Kennedy , Scott A. Lorch , Dylan S. Small

Instrumental variable methods provide useful tools for inferring causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To apply these methods with large-scale data sets, a major challenge is to find valid instruments from a possibly…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-24 Xinyi Zhang , Linbo Wang , Stanislav Volgushev , Dehan Kong