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Assessing causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding is a challenging problem. Existing studies leveraged proxy variables or multiple treatments to adjust for the confounding bias. In particular, the latter approach attributes…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-17 Yong Wu , Mingzhou Liu , Jing Yan , Yanwei Fu , Shouyan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Xinwei Sun

The problem of how to best select variables for confounding adjustment forms one of the key challenges in the evaluation of exposure effects in observational studies, and has been the subject of vigorous recent activity in causal inference.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-02 Kelly Van Lancker , Oliver Dukes , Stijn Vansteelandt

A sensitivity analysis in an observational study assesses the robustness of significant findings to unmeasured confounding. While sensitivity analyses in matched observational studies have been well addressed when there is a single outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-11-05 Colin B. Fogarty , Dylan S. Small

Mendelian randomization (MR) is widely used to uncover causal relationships in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However, most existing MR methods presuppose linear causality, risking bias when the true relationships are nonlinear,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-05 Xinpei Wang , Tao Huang , Jinzhu Jia

The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Olivier Jeunen , Ciarán M. Gilligan-Lee , Rishabh Mehrotra , Mounia Lalmas

Thanks to technological advances leading to near-continuous time observations, emerging multivariate point process data offer new opportunities for causal discovery. However, a key obstacle in achieving this goal is that many relevant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-15 Xu Wang , Ali Shojaie

Motivated by the simultaneous association analysis with the presence of latent confounders, this paper studies the large-scale hypothesis testing problem for the high-dimensional confounded linear models with both non-asymptotic and…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-24 Yinrui Sun , Li Ma , Yin Xia

Software systems with large parameter spaces, nondeterminism and high computational cost are challenging to test. Recently, software testing techniques based on causal inference have been successfully applied to systems that exhibit such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Michael Foster , Robert M. Hierons , Donghwan Shin , Neil Walkinshaw , Christopher Wild

Due to the unobservability of confoundings, there has been widespread concern about how to compute causality quantitatively. To address this challenge, proxy-based negative control approaches have been commonly adopted, where auxiliary…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-09 Zhiheng Zhang

Disparities in health or well-being experienced by minority groups can be difficult to study using the traditional exposure-outcome paradigm in causal inference, since potential outcomes in variables such as race or sexual minority status…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-22 Andy A. Shen , Elina Visoki , Ran Barzilay , Samuel D. Pimentel

Quantifying cause and effect relationships is an important problem in many domains. The gold standard solution is to conduct a randomised controlled trial. However, in many situations such trials cannot be performed. In the absence of such…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-19 Jakob Zeitler , Athanasios Vlontzos , Ciaran M. Gilligan-Lee

The fundamental challenge of drawing causal inference is that counterfactual outcomes are not fully observed for any unit. Furthermore, in observational studies, treatment assignment is likely to be confounded. Many statistical methods have…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-01 Harsh Parikh , Carlos Varjao , Louise Xu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

This paper clarifies a fundamental difference between causal inference and traditional statistical inference by formalizing a mathematical distinction between their respective parameters. We connect two major approaches to causal inference,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-29 Muye Liu , Jun Xie

We study the identification and estimation of long-term treatment effects when both experimental and observational data are available. Since the long-term outcome is observed only after a long delay, it is not measured in the experimental…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-04 Guido Imbens , Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Yuhao Wang

Understanding and quantifying cause and effect is an important problem in many domains. The generally-agreed solution to this problem is to perform a randomised controlled trial. However, even when randomised controlled trials can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-22 Graham Van Goffrier , Lucas Maystre , Ciarán Gilligan-Lee

Sensitivity analysis is widely used to assess the robustness of causal conclusions in observational studies, yet its interaction with the structure of measured covariates is often overlooked. When latent confounders cannot be directly…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-17 Abhinandan Dalal , Iris Horng , Yang Feng , Dylan S. Small

Causal inference from observational data often assumes "ignorability," that all confounders are observed. This assumption is standard yet untestable. However, many scientific studies involve multiple causes, different variables whose…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-16 Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

Unmeasured confounding may undermine the validity of causal inference with observational studies. Sensitivity analysis provides an attractive way to partially circumvent this issue by assessing the potential influence of unmeasured…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-07-15 Peng Ding , Tyler VanderWeele

This paper addresses the problem of identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment in the presence of unmeasured confounding and various types of right-censoring. Examples of these censoring mechanisms are administrative…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-19 Ilias Willems , Sara Rutten , Gilles Crommen , Ingrid Van Keilegom

Whereas confidence intervals are used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured individuals, confounding intervals can be used to assess uncertainty due to unmeasured attributes. Previously, we have introduced a methodology for computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-13 Brian Knaeble , R Mitchell Hughes