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The identification of causal effects in observational studies typically relies on two standard assumptions: unconfoundedness and overlap. However, both assumptions are often questionable in practice: unconfoundedness is inherently…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Han Cui , Xinran Li

Inferring the causal effect of a non-randomly assigned exposure on an outcome requires adjusting for common causes of the exposure and outcome to avoid biased conclusions. Notwithstanding the efforts investigators routinely make to measure…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

Causal effect estimation has been studied by many researchers when only observational data is available. Sound and complete algorithms have been developed for pointwise estimation of identifiable causal queries. For non-identifiable causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Ziwei Jiang , Lai Wei , Murat Kocaoglu

Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-30 M. Usaid Awan , Yameng Liu , Marco Morucci , Sudeepa Roy , Cynthia Rudin , Alexander Volfovsky

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

The assumption of no unmeasured confounders is a critical but unverifiable assumption required for causal inference yet quantitative sensitivity analyses to assess robustness of real-world evidence remains underutilized. The lack of use is…

The idea of covariate balance is at the core of causal inference. Inverse propensity weights play a central role because they are the unique set of weights that balance the covariate distributions of different treatment groups. We discuss…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-29 Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller , David A. Hirshberg , José R. Zubizarreta

Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-18 Shanshan Luo , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li

Unmeasured confounding remains a critical challenge in causal inference for the social sciences. This paper proposes a sensitivity analysis framework to systematically evaluate how unmeasured confounders influence statistical inference in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-21 Cheng Lin , Jose M. Pena , Adel Daoud

In observational studies, potential unobserved confounding is a major barrier in isolating the average causal effect (ACE). In these scenarios, two main approaches are often used: confounder adjustment for causality (CAC) and instrumental…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-26 Roy S. Zawadzki , Daniel L. Gillen

Many observational studies feature irregular longitudinal data, where the observation times are not common across individuals in the study. Further, the observation times may be related to the longitudinal outcome. In this setting, failing…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-27 Grace Tompkins , Joel A Dubin , Michael Wallace

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-20 Alexander D'Amour

Propensity score (PS) methods are widely used in observational studies to reduce confounding and estimate causal treatment effects. However, the validity of PS-based causal estimators depends heavily on correct model specification, and…

A key objective of decomposition analysis is to identify a factor (the 'mediator') contributing to disparities in an outcome between social groups. In decomposition analysis, a scholarly interest often centers on estimating how much the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-27 Soojin Park , Suyeon Kang , Chioun Lee , Shujie Ma

When data contains measurement errors, it is necessary to make assumptions relating the observed, erroneous data to the unobserved true phenomena of interest. These assumptions should be justifiable on substantive grounds, but are often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-24 Noam Finkelstein , Roy Adams , Suchi Saria , Ilya Shpitser

Randomized clinical trials with time-to-event outcomes have traditionally used the log-rank test followed by the Cox proportional hazards (PH) model to estimate the hazard ratio between the treatment groups. These are valid under the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-07 Jiyu Luo , Ronghui Xu

When studying the causal effect of $x$ on $y$, researchers may conduct regression and report a confidence interval for the slope coefficient $\beta_{x}$. This common confidence interval provides an assessment of uncertainty from sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-08-26 Brian Knaeble , Braxton Osting , Mark Abramson

Sensitivity analysis for unmeasured confounding under incremental propensity score interventions remains relatively underdeveloped. Incremental interventions define stochastic treatment regimes by multiplying the odds of treatment, offering…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-27 Shuying Shen , Valerio Bacak , Edward H. Kennedy

In this paper, we discuss causal inference on the efficacy of a treatment or medication on a time-to-event outcome with competing risks. Although the treatment group can be randomized, there can be confoundings between the compliance and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-06 Cheng Zheng , Ran Dai , Parameswaran Hari , Mei-Jie Zhang

In the era of fast-paced precision medicine, observational studies play a major role in properly evaluating new treatments in clinical practice. Yet, unobserved confounding can significantly compromise causal conclusions drawn from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-20 Piersilvio De Bartolomeis , Javier Abad , Konstantin Donhauser , Fanny Yang