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Finding valid instruments is difficult. We propose Validity Set Instrumental Variable (VSIV) estimation, a method for estimating local average treatment effects (LATEs) in heterogeneous causal effect models when the instruments are…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-02-11 Zhenting Sun , Kaspar Wüthrich

Instrumental variables have been widely used for estimating the causal effect between exposure and outcome. Conventional estimation methods require complete knowledge about all the instruments' validity; a valid instrument must not have a…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-09-23 Hyunseung Kang , Anru Zhang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

Querying causal effects from time-series data is important across various fields, including healthcare, economics, climate science, and epidemiology. However, this task becomes complex in the existence of time-varying latent confounders,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Thuc duy Le , Xudong Guo , Shichao Zhang

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding between exposure and outcome. An IV must affect the outcome exclusively through the exposure and be unconfounded with the…

Unobserved confounding is the main obstacle to causal effect estimation from observational data. Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for causal effect estimation when there exist latent confounders. With the standard IV method,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jiji Zhang , Thuc duy Le , Jixue Liu

This paper discusses estimation with a categorical instrumental variable in settings with potentially few observations per category. The proposed categorical instrumental variable estimator (CIV) leverages a regularization assumption that…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-05-27 Thomas Wiemann

Instrumental variable (IV) regression is a strategy for learning causal relationships in observational data. If measurements of input X and output Y are confounded, the causal relationship can nonetheless be identified if an instrumental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Rahul Singh , Maneesh Sahani , Arthur Gretton

A major challenge in instrumental variables (IV) analysis is to find instruments that are valid, or have no direct effect on the outcome and are ignorable. Typically one is unsure whether all of the putative IVs are in fact valid. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-10 Zijian Guo , Hyunseung Kang , T. Tony Cai , Dylan S. Small

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Thuc Duy Le , Jixue Liu

Causal inference is the process of using assumptions, study designs, and estimation strategies to draw conclusions about the causal relationships between variables based on data. This allows researchers to better understand the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Ruoxuan Xiong , Fei Wu

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 offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

The instrumental variables (IV) method is a method for making causal inferences about the effect of a treatment based on an observational study in which there are unmeasured confounding variables. The method requires a valid IV, a variable…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-08-19 Dylan Small , Zhiqiang Tan , Scott Lorch , Alan Brookhart

Instrumental variables (IVs), sources of treatment randomization that are conditionally independent of the outcome, play an important role in causal inference with unobserved confounders. However, the existing IV-based counterfactual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-14 Junkun Yuan , Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Fei Wu , Lanfen Lin

Instrumental variables (IV) regression is a popular method for the estimation of the endogenous treatment effects. Conventional IV methods require all the instruments are relevant and valid. However, this is impractical especially in…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-06-29 Qingliang Fan , Yaqian Wu

We address the issue of the testability of instrumental variables derived from observational data. Most existing testable implications are centered on scenarios where the treatment is a discrete variable, e.g., instrumental inequality…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-13 Xichen Guo , Zheng Li , Biwei Huang , Yan Zeng , Zhi Geng , Feng Xie

Instrumental variable methods are among the most commonly used causal inference approaches to deal with unmeasured confounders in observational studies. The presence of invalid instruments is the primary concern for practical applications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-18 Zijian Guo

Standard instrumental variables (IV) methods identify a Local Average Treatment Effect under monotonicity, which rules out defiers. In many empirical environments, however, distinct instruments may induce heterogeneous and even opposing…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-16 Johann Caro-Burnett

Traditional instrumental variable (IV) estimators face a fundamental constraint: they can only accommodate as many endogenous treatment variables as available instruments. This limitation becomes particularly challenging in settings where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shiangyi Lin , Hui Lan , Vasilis Syrgkanis

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