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Nonlinear causal effects are prevalent in many research scenarios involving continuous exposures, and instrumental variables (IVs) can be employed to investigate such effects, particularly in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-29 Haodong Tian , Ashish Patel , Stephen Burgess

Visual reinforcement learning (RL), which makes decisions directly from high-dimensional visual inputs, has demonstrated significant potential in various domains. However, deploying visual RL techniques in the real world remains challenging…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Guozheng Ma , Zhen Wang , Zhecheng Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Bo Yuan , Dacheng Tao

Data augmentation (DA) is a crucial technique for enhancing the sample efficiency of visual reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Notably, employing simple observation transformations alone can yield outstanding performance without extra…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Guozheng Ma , Linrui Zhang , Haoyu Wang , Lu Li , Zilin Wang , Zhen Wang , Li Shen , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Recent theoretical work in causal inference has explored an important class of variables which, when conditioned on, may further amplify existing unmeasured confounding bias (bias amplification). Despite this theoretical work, existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-03-20 Tyrel Stokes , Russell Steele , Ian Shrier

Latent confounders are a fundamental challenge for inferring causal effects from observational data. The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a practical way to address this challenge. Existing IV based estimators need a known IV or other…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Ziqi Xu , Weijia Zhang , Jixue Liu , Thuc Duy Le

Causal effect estimation seeks to determine the impact of an intervention from observational data. However, the existing causal inference literature primarily addresses treatment effects on frequently occurring events. But what if we are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Jiyuan Tan , Jose Blanchet , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Selecting causal inference models for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) from observational data presents a unique challenge since the counterfactual outcomes are never observed. The problem is challenged further in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Trent Kyono , Ioana Bica , Zhaozhi Qian , Mihaela van der Schaar

Adjusting for covariates is a well established method to estimate the total causal effect of an exposure variable on an outcome of interest. Depending on the causal structure of the mechanism under study there may be different adjustment…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-04-27 Jack Kuipers , Giusi Moffa

Instrumental variable (IV) methods mitigate bias from unobserved confounding in observational causal inference but rely on the availability of a valid instrument, which can often be difficult or infeasible to identify in practice. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-08 Frances Dean , Jenna Fields , Radhika Bhalerao , Marie Charpignon , Ahmed Alaa

Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-10 Liuyi Yao , Zhixuan Chu , Sheng Li , Yaliang Li , Jing Gao , Aidong Zhang

While many areas of machine learning have benefited from the increasing availability of large and varied datasets, the benefit to causal inference has been limited given the strong assumptions needed to ensure identifiability of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-02 Wenshuo Guo , Serena Wang , Peng Ding , Yixin Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Instrumental variable methods provide a powerful approach to estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. But a key challenge when applying them is the reliance on untestable "exclusion" assumptions that rule out any…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-23 Jason Hartford , Victor Veitch , Dhanya Sridhar , Kevin Leyton-Brown

In causal inference, encouragement designs (EDs) are widely used to analyze causal effects, when randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are impractical or compliance to treatment cannot be perfectly enforced. Unlike RCTs, which directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Xiangwei Chen , Zexu Sun , Fei Wu , Kun Zhang

Estimating causal effects from high-dimensional, structured exposures is a fundamental challenge in modern applications ranging from neuroscience and finance to environmental science. While the literature has addressed high-dimensional…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-29 Samhita Pal , Dhrubajyoti Ghosh

Data Augmentation (DA) -- enriching training data by adding synthetic samples -- is a technique widely adopted in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks to improve models performance. Yet, DA has struggled to gain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Chao Wang , Alessandro Finamore , Pietro Michiardi , Massimo Gallo , Dario Rossi

Data augmentation has been widely applied as an effective methodology to improve generalization in particular when training deep neural networks. Recently, researchers proposed a few intensive data augmentation techniques, which indeed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-22 Zhuoxun He , Lingxi Xie , Xin Chen , Ya Zhang , Yanfeng Wang , Qi Tian

Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) are considered a promising recipe to deliver better policy interventions. One key ingredient in optimal ITR estimation problems is to estimate the average treatment effect conditional on a subject's…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-16 Hongming Pu , Bo Zhang

The defining challenge for causal inference from observational data is the presence of `confounders', covariates that affect both treatment assignment and the outcome. To address this challenge, practitioners collect and adjust for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Claudia Shi , Victor Veitch , David Blei

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

A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Wenhao Zhang , Ramin Ramezani , Arash Naeim