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Scientific and business practices are increasingly resulting in large collections of randomized experiments. Analyzed together, these collections can tell us things that individual experiments in the collection cannot. We study how to learn…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-02 Alexander Peysakhovich , Dean Eckles

Two-stage randomized experiments are becoming an increasingly popular experimental design for causal inference when the outcome of one unit may be affected by the treatment assignments of other units in the same cluster. In this paper, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-21 Zhichao Jiang , Kosuke Imai , Anup Malani

Instrumental Variable (IV) provides a source of treatment randomization that is conditionally independent of the outcomes, responding to the challenges of counterfactual and confounding biases. In finance, IV construction typically relies…

General Economics · Economics 2024-11-27 Ying Chen , Ziwei Xu , Kotaro Inoue , Ryutaro Ichise

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

Much research has been devoted to the problem of estimating treatment effects from observational data; however, most methods assume that the observed variables only contain confounders, i.e., variables that affect both the treatment and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Weijia Zhang , Lin Liu , Jiuyong Li

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

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

We propose an instrumental variable framework for identifying and estimating causal effects of discrete and continuous treatments with binary instruments. The basis of our approach is a local copula representation of the joint distribution…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-12-17 Victor Chernozhukov , Iván Fernández-Val , Sukjin Han , Kaspar Wüthrich

Modified treatment policies are a widely applicable class of interventions useful for studying the causal effects of continuous exposures. Approaches to evaluating their causal effects assume no interference, meaning that such effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-12 Salvador V. Balkus , Scott W. Delaney , Nima S. Hejazi

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

This paper considers identification and estimation of the causal effect of the time Z until a subject is treated on a survival outcome T. The treatment is not randomly assigned, T is randomly right censored by a random variable C and the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-12-20 Jad Beyhum , Samuele Centorrino , Jean-Pierre Florens , Ingrid Van Keilegom

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-11 Dominik Rothenhäusler , Bin Yu

Empirical researchers routinely invoke the no-interference or \textit{individualistic treatment response} (ITR) assumption to identify causal effects in observational studies, despite concerns that interference across units may arise in…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-27 Julius Owusu , Monika Avila Márquez

Causal inference with interference is a rapidly growing area. The literature has begun to relax the "no-interference" assumption that the treatment received by one individual does not affect the outcomes of other individuals. In this paper…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-06 Tyler J. VanderWeele , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , M. Elizabeth Halloran

We present new results on average causal effects in settings with unmeasured exposure-outcome confounding. Our results are motivated by a class of estimands, e.g., frequently of interest in medicine and public health, that are currently not…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-25 Lan Wen , Aaron L. Sarvet , Mats J. Stensrud

This study considers testing the specification of spillover effects in causal inference. We focus on experimental settings in which the treatment assignment mechanism is known to researchers. We develop a new randomization test utilizing a…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-27 Tadao Hoshino , Takahide Yanagi

Exclusion and exogeneity are core assumptions in instrumental variable (IV) analyses, but their empirical validity is often debated. This paper develops new sensitivity analyses for these assumptions. Our results accommodate arbitrary…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-10 Paul Diegert , Matthew A. Masten , Alexandre Poirier

Standard instrumental variables (IV) methods identify a Local Average Treatment Effect under monotonicity, which rules out defiers. In many empirical environments, however, distinct instruments may induce heterogeneous and even opposing…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-16 Johann Caro-Burnett

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are central to causal inference from observational data, particularly when a randomized experiment is not feasible. However, of the three conventional core IV identification conditions, only one, IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-23 Zhonghua Liu , Baoluo Sun , Ting Ye , David Richardson , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Nicolas Apfel , Julia Hatamyar , Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck