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We provide an approach to exploratory data analysis in matched observational studies with a single intervention and multiple endpoints. In such settings, the researcher would like to explore evidence for actual treatment effects among these…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-10 Mengqi Lin , Colin Fogarty

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental obstacle to establishing valid causal conclusions from observational data. Two complementary types of approaches have been developed to address this obstacle: obtaining identification using fortuitous…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-27 Ilya Shpitser , Zach Wood-Doughty , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Modern medical research demands specialized causal inference methods evaluating complex continuous-time dynamic treatment regimens using observational data. For instance, obtaining the causal effects of intravenous administration, a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Haiyan Zhu , Yingchun Zhou

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

Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Sepehr Elahi , Sina Akbari , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash , Patrick Thiran

I develop a new identification strategy for treatment effects when noisy measurements of unobserved confounding factors are available. I use proxy variables to construct a random variable conditional on which treatment variables become…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-09-30 Kenichi Nagasawa

Ascertaining causal direction from observational data is a fundamental challenge in scientific inquiry. Of particular interest is the problem of covariate-adjusted bivariate causal discovery, i.e., determining the causal direction between X…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-30 Soumik Purkayastha , Peter X. -K. Song

Causal discovery in the presence of unobserved common causes from observational data only is a crucial but challenging problem. We categorize all possible causal relationships between two random variables into the following four categories…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Masatoshi Kobayashi , Kohei Miyagichi , Shin Matsushima

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

Analysis of observational studies increasingly confronts the challenge of determining which of a possibly high-dimensional set of available covariates are required to satisfy the assumption of ignorable treatment assignment for estimation…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-23 Chanmin Kim , Mauricio Tec , Corwin M Zigler

For a continuous random variable $Z$, testing conditional independence $X \perp\!\!\!\perp Y |Z$ is known to be a particularly hard problem. It constitutes a key ingredient of many constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. These…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-21 Philip A. Boeken , Joris M. Mooij

A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Alexandre Trilla , Nenad Mijatovic

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Proximal causal inference (PCI) is a recently proposed framework to identify and estimate the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome in the presence of hidden confounders, using observed proxies. Specifically, PCI relies on two types of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-29 Prabrisha Rakshit , Xu Shi , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

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

Causal inference with observational studies often suffers from unmeasured confounding, yielding biased estimators based on the unconfoundedness assumption. Sensitivity analysis assesses how the causal conclusions change with respect to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-01 Sizhu Lu , Peng Ding

Many proposals for the identification of causal effects require an instrumental variable that satisfies strong, untestable unconfoundedness and exclusion restriction assumptions. In this paper, we show how one can potentially identify…

Purpose of Review: Negative controls are a powerful tool to detect and adjust for bias in epidemiological research. This paper introduces negative controls to a broader audience and provides guidance on principled design and causal analysis…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-20 Xu Shi , Wang Miao , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Estimating the effect of intervention from observational data while accounting for confounding variables is a key task in causal inference. Oftentimes, the confounders are unobserved, but we have access to large amounts of additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Shachi Deshpande , Kaiwen Wang , Dhruv Sreenivas , Zheng Li , Volodymyr Kuleshov

We consider the problem of estimating a causal effect in a multi-domain setting. The causal effect of interest is confounded by an unobserved confounder and can change between the different domains. We assume that we have access to a proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Manuel Iglesias-Alonso , Felix Schur , Julius von Kügelgen , Jonas Peters