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Related papers: When Is Causal Inference Possible? A Statistical T…

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A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Jiji Zhang , Peter L. Spirtes

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

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

Causal inference analysis is the estimation of the effects of actions on outcomes. In the context of healthcare data this means estimating the outcome of counter-factual treatments (i.e. including treatments that were not observed) on a…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-03-21 Yishai Shimoni , Chen Yanover , Ehud Karavani , Yaara Goldschmnidt

To unbiasedly estimate a causal effect on an outcome unconfoundedness is often assumed. If there is sufficient knowledge on the underlying causal structure then existing confounder selection criteria can be used to select subsets of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-20 Jenny Häggström

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

Causal inference, a critical tool for informing business decisions, traditionally relies heavily on structured data. However, in many real-world scenarios, such data can be incomplete or unavailable. This paper presents a framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Boning Zhou , Ziyu Wang , Han Hong , Haoqi Hu

Inferring the causal structure that links n observables is usually based upon detecting statistical dependences and choosing simple graphs that make the joint measure Markovian. Here we argue why causal inference is also possible when only…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-04-24 Dominik Janzing , Bernhard Schoelkopf

A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Wenhao Zhang , Ramin Ramezani , Arash Naeim

In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-26 Jiajing Zheng , Jiaxi Wu , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer",…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-25 Vidushi Adlakha , Eric Kuo

A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-07 Rickard K. A. Karlsson , Jesse H. Krijthe

Observational studies are the primary source of data for causal inference, but it is challenging when existing unmeasured confounding. Missing data problems are also common in observational studies. How to obtain the causal effects from the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-15 Renzhong Zheng

Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-31 Yang Ou , Lu Tang , Chung-Chou H. Chang

Understanding causal relationships among the variables of a system is paramount to explain and control its behavior. For many real-world systems, however, the true causal graph is not readily available and one must resort to predictions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-20 Elias Eulig , Atalanti A. Mastakouri , Patrick Blöbaum , Michaela Hardt , Dominik Janzing

When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical…

Causal graphs may inform covariate adjustment for estimating causal effects and improve estimation efficiency by exploiting the graphical structure. In many applications, however, the target causal parameter may not be point-identified due…

Ensuring robust model performance in diverse real-world scenarios requires addressing generalizability across domains with covariate shifts. However, no formal procedure exists for statistically evaluating generalizability in machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Daniel de Vassimon Manela , Linying Yang , Robin J. Evans

The study of causality or causal inference - how much a given treatment causally affects a given outcome in a population - goes way beyond correlation or association analysis of variables, and is critical in making sound data driven…

Databases · Computer Science 2017-08-09 Sudeepa Roy , Babak Salimi

The aim of this paper is to discuss a recent result which shows that probabilistic inference in the presence of (unknown) causal mechanisms can be tractable for models that have traditionally been viewed as intractable. This result was…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Adnan Darwiche