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We develop a design-based framework for causal inference that accommodates random potential outcomes without introducing outcome models, thereby extending the classical Neyman--Rubin paradigm in which outcomes are treated as fixed. By…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-14 Yukai Yang

Causal inference methods such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-differences are widely used to identify and estimate treatment effects. However, when outcomes are qualitative, their application poses…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-30 Riccardo Di Francesco , Giovanni Mellace

This paper concerns the probabilistic evaluation of the effects of actions in the presence of unmeasured variables. We show that the identification of causal effect between a singleton variable X and a set of variables Y can be accomplished…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 David Galles , Judea Pearl

Observational data is increasingly used as a means for making individual-level causal predictions and intervention recommendations. The foremost challenge of causal inference from observational data is hidden confounding, whose presence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Nathan Kallus , Aahlad Manas Puli , Uri Shalit

Random-effects meta-analyses of observational studies can produce biased estimates if the synthesized studies are subject to unmeasured confounding. We propose sensitivity analyses quantifying the extent to which unmeasured confounding of…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-10 Maya B. Mathur , Tyler J. VanderWeele

Causal inference quantifies cause-effect relationships by estimating counterfactual parameters from data. This entails using \emph{identification theory} to establish a link between counterfactual parameters of interest and distributions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-17 Jaron J. R. Lee , Ilya Shpitser

A vast amount of expert and domain knowledge is captured by causal structural priors, yet there has been little research on testing such priors for generalization and data synthesis purposes. We propose a novel model architecture, Causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Jeffrey Jiang , Omead Pooladzandi , Sunay Bhat , Gregory Pottie

We consider the problem of learning a causal graph in the presence of measurement error. This setting is for example common in genomics, where gene expression is corrupted through the measurement process. We develop a provably consistent…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-04 Basil Saeed , Anastasiya Belyaeva , Yuhao Wang , Caroline Uhler

A crucial input into causal inference is the imputed counterfactual outcome. Imputation error can arise because of sampling uncertainty from estimating the prediction model using the untreated observations, or from out-of-sample information…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-05-20 Silvia Goncalves , Serena Ng

Causal discovery, the task of inferring causal structure from data, has the potential to uncover mechanistic insights from biological experiments, especially those involving perturbations. However, causal discovery algorithms over larger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Menghua Wu , Yujia Bao , Regina Barzilay , Tommi Jaakkola

Causal discovery estimates the underlying physical process that generates the observed data: does X cause Y or does Y cause X? Current methodologies use structural conditions to turn the causal query into a statistical query, when only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-14 Martin Jørgensen , Søren Hauberg

Causal inference relies on two fundamental assumptions: ignorability and positivity. We study causal inference when the true confounder value can be expressed as a function of the observed data; we call this setting estimation with…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-18 Aahlad Puli , Adler J. Perotte , Rajesh Ranganath

The fundamental challenge in causal induction is to infer the underlying graph structure given observational and/or interventional data. Most existing causal induction algorithms operate by generating candidate graphs and evaluating them…

We describe a design-based framework for drawing causal inference in general randomized experiments. Causal effects are defined as linear functionals evaluated at unit-level potential outcome functions. Assumptions about the potential…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-15 Christopher Harshaw , Fredrik Sävje , Yitan Wang

Clustering is part of unsupervised analysis methods that consist in grouping samples into homogeneous and separate subgroups of observations also called clusters. To interpret the clusters, statistical hypothesis testing is often used to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-25 Benjamin Hivert , Denis Agniel , Rodolphe Thiébaut , Boris P Hejblum

The capacity to address counterfactual "what if" inquiries is crucial for understanding and making use of causal influences. Traditional counterfactual inference, under Pearls' counterfactual framework, typically depends on having access to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Shaoan Xie , Biwei Huang , Bin Gu , Tongliang Liu , Kun Zhang

Conditional-independence-based discovery uses statistical tests to identify a graphical model that represents the independence structure of variables in a dataset. These tests, however, can be unreliable, and algorithms are sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Philipp M. Faller , Dominik Janzing

Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature, where complete algorithms have been proposed to identify causal queries of interest. The validity of these algorithms hinges on the restrictive assumption of having…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Sina Akbari , Fateme Jamshidi , Ehsan Mokhtarian , Matthew J. Vowels , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We give a selective review of some recent developments in causal inference, intended for researchers who are not familiar with graphical models and causality, and with a focus on methods that are applicable to large data sets. We mainly…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-06-26 Marloes H. Maathuis , Preetam Nandy

Counterfactual inference is a useful tool for comparing outcomes of interventions on complex systems. It requires us to represent the system in form of a structural causal model, complete with a causal diagram, probabilistic assumptions on…