English
Related papers

Related papers: Cyclic Counterfactuals under Shift-Scale Intervent…

200 papers

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…

We formulate a general framework for building structural causal models (SCMs) with deep learning components. The proposed approach employs normalising flows and variational inference to enable tractable inference of exogenous noise…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-26 Nick Pawlowski , Daniel C. Castro , Ben Glocker

Estimating joint distributions (a.k.a. couplings) over counterfactual outcomes is central to personalized decision-making and treatment risk assessment. Two emergent frameworks with identifiability guarantees are: (i) bijective structural…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-26 Hugh Dance , Benjamin Bloem-Reddy

Many empirical studies estimate causal effects in environments where economic units interact through spatial or network connections. In such settings, outcomes are jointly determined, and treatment induced shocks propagate across…

General Economics · Economics 2026-01-05 Mariluz Mate

Counterfactual inference considers a hypothetical intervention in a parallel world that shares some evidence with the factual world. If the evidence specifies a conditional distribution on a manifold, counterfactuals may be analytically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-03 Juha Karvanen , Santtu Tikka , Matti Vihola

Interpretability research takes counterfactual theories of causality for granted. Most causal methods rely on counterfactual interventions to inputs or the activations of particular model components, followed by observations of the change…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Aaron Mueller

Evaluating hypothetical statements about how the world would be had a different course of action been taken is arguably one key capability expected from modern AI systems. Counterfactual reasoning underpins discussions in fairness, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Kevin Xia , Yushu Pan , Elias Bareinboim

Predictive models can fail to generalize from training to deployment environments because of dataset shift, posing a threat to model reliability and the safety of downstream decisions made in practice. Instead of using samples from the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-10 Adarsh Subbaswamy , Suchi Saria

Counterfactual thinking is a crucial yet challenging topic for artificial intelligence to learn knowledge from data and ultimately improve performance for new scenarios. Many research works, including the Potential Outcome Model (POM) and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Mingyu Kang , Duxin Chen , Ziyuan Pu , Jianxi Gao , Wenwu Yu

Causal inference from observational data following the restricted structural causal model (SCM) framework hinges largely on the asymmetry between cause and effect from the data generating mechanisms, such as non-Gaussianity or nonlinearity.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-06 Kang Du , Yu Xiang

Counterfactual explanations utilize feature perturbations to analyze the outcome of an original decision and recommend an actionable recourse. We argue that it is beneficial to provide several alternative explanations rather than a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Natraj Raman , Daniele Magazzeni , Sameena Shah

We examine counterfactual explanations for explaining the decisions made by model-based AI systems. The counterfactual approach we consider defines an explanation as a set of the system's data inputs that causally drives the decision (i.e.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Carlos Fernández-Loría , Foster Provost , Xintian Han

Recent advances in probabilistic generative modeling have motivated learning Structural Causal Models (SCM) from observational datasets using deep conditional generative models, also known as Deep Structural Causal Models (DSCM). If…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-24 Arash Nasr-Esfahany , Emre Kiciman

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are a standard tool in causal modeling, but their suitability for capturing the complexity of large-scale multimodal data is questionable. In practice, real-world multimodal datasets are often collected from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuhang Liu , Zhen Zhang , Dong Gong , Erdun Gao , Biwei Huang , Mingming Gong , Anton van den Hengel , Kun Zhang , Javen Qinfeng Shi

With the increasing impact of algorithmic decision-making on human lives, the interpretability of models has become a critical issue in machine learning. Counterfactual explanation is an important method in the field of interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Ao Xu , Tieru Wu

Synthetic control (SC) methods have been widely applied to estimate the causal effect of large-scale interventions, e.g., the state-wide effect of a change in policy. The idea of synthetic controls is to approximate one unit's…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-15 Claudia Shi , Dhanya Sridhar , Vishal Misra , David M. Blei

Many methods for causal inference generate directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that formalize causal relations between $n$ variables. Given the joint distribution on all these variables, the DAG contains all information about how intervening on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-01-29 Dominik Janzing , David Balduzzi , Moritz Grosse-Wentrup , Bernhard Schölkopf

With the widespread accumulation of observational data, researchers obtain a new direction to learn counterfactual effects in many domains (e.g., health care and computational advertising) without Randomized Controlled Trials(RCTs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Guanglin Zhou , Lina Yao , Xiwei Xu , Chen Wang , Liming Zhu

We assume to be given structural equations over discrete variables inducing a directed acyclic graph, namely, a structural causal model, together with data about its internal nodes. The question we want to answer is how we can compute…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Marco Zaffalon , Alessandro Antonucci , Rafael Cabañas , David Huber , Dario Azzimonti

Causal inference with observational data critically relies on untestable and extra-statistical assumptions that have (sometimes) testable implications. Well-known sets of assumptions that are sufficient to justify the causal interpretation…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-20 Pablo Geraldo Bastías