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Related papers: Transferring Causal Effects using Proxies

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Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Feng Xie , Zhengming Chen , Shanshan Luo , Wang Miao , Ruichu Cai , Zhi Geng

Unobserved confounding is a key challenge when estimating causal effects from a treatment on an outcome in scientific applications. In this work, we assume that we observe a single, potentially multi-dimensional proxy variable of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-13 Silvan Vollmer , Niklas Pfister , Sebastian Weichwald

We consider a causal effect that is confounded by an unobserved variable, but with observed proxy variables of the confounder. We show that, with at least two independent proxy variables satisfying a certain rank condition, the causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-29 Wang Miao , Zhi Geng , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Aytijhya Saha , Stephen Bates , Devavrat Shah

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

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Helen Guo , Ilya Shpitser , Elizabeth L. Ogburn

Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Christos Louizos , Uri Shalit , Joris Mooij , David Sontag , Richard Zemel , Max Welling

We investigate the estimation of the causal effect of a treatment variable on an outcome in the presence of a latent confounder. We first show that the causal effect is identifiable under certain conditions when data is available from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Yaroslav Kivva , Sina Akbari , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash

A common concern when trying to draw causal inferences from observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding. In practice, many of the covariates may only be proxies of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-31 Oliver Dukes , Ilya Shpitser , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

Proximal causal inference is a recently proposed framework for evaluating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For point identification of causal effects, it leverages a pair of so-called treatment and outcome…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Proximal causal inference (PCI) has emerged as a promising framework for identifying and estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. While many traditional causal inference methods rely on the assumption of no…

Who should we prioritize for treatment when causal effects cannot be estimated? In practice, organizations often rely on predictive proxies: ads are targeted using purchase probabilities, and retention incentives are allocated using…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Carlos Fernández-Loría , Jorge Loría

We present new results for nonparametric identification of causal effects using noisy proxies for unobserved confounders. Our approach builds on the results of \citet{Hu2008} who tackle the problem of general measurement error. We call this…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-05-05 Ben Deaner

The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Antonio Olivas-Martinez , Peter B. Gilbert , Andrea Rotnitzky

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 the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in linear structural causal models (SCM) with latent confounders when we have access to a single proxy variable. Several methods (such as…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yaroslav Kivva , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash

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

We consider the problem of causal effect estimation with an unobserved confounder, where we observe a single proxy variable that is associated with the confounder. Although it has been shown that the recovery of an average causal effect is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-19 Liyuan Xu , Arthur Gretton

Proximal causal inference was recently proposed as a framework to identify causal effects from observational data in the presence of hidden confounders for which proxies are available. In this paper, we extend the proximal causal inference…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-27 AmirEmad Ghassami , Alan Yang , Ilya Shpitser , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Discovering causal relations is fundamental to reasoning and intelligence. In particular, observational causal discovery algorithms estimate the cause-effect relation between two random entities $X$ and $Y$, given $n$ samples from $P(X,Y)$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-24 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Marco Baroni , David Lopez-Paz
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