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Instrumental variables are widely used to deal with unmeasured confounding in observational studies and imperfect randomized controlled trials. In these studies, researchers often target the so-called local average treatment effect as it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-24 Linbo Wang , Yuexia Zhang , Thomas S. Richardson , James M. Robins

Instrumental variables are widely used in econometrics and epidemiology for identifying and estimating causal effects when an exposure of interest is confounded by unmeasured factors. Despite this popularity, the assumptions invoked to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-15 Alexander W. Levis , Edward H. Kennedy , Luke Keele

Instrumental variables have proven useful, in particular within the social sciences and economics, for making inference about the causal effect of a random variable, B, on another random variable, C, in the presence of unobserved…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-06-26 Roland R. Ramsahai

Our work addresses a fundamental problem in the context of counterfactual inference for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Given an MDP path $\tau$, this kind of inference allows us to derive counterfactual paths $\tau'$ describing what-if…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Milad Kazemi , Jessica Lally , Ekaterina Tishchenko , Hana Chockler , Nicola Paoletti

In pharmacoepidemiology research, instrumental variables (IVs) are variables that strongly predict treatment but have no causal effect on the outcome of interest except through the treatment. There remain concerns about the inclusion of IVs…

Causal inference methods are gaining increasing prominence in pharmaceutical drug development in light of the recently published addendum on estimands and sensitivity analysis in clinical trials to the E9 guideline of the International…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-30 Jack Bowden , Bjoern Bornkamp , Ekkehard Glimm , Frank Bretz

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

To conduct causal inference in observational settings, researchers must rely on certain identifying assumptions. In practice, these assumptions are unlikely to hold exactly. This paper considers the bias of selection-on-observables,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-26 Melody Huang , Cory McCartan

This paper extends the identification results in Nevo and Rosen (2012) to nonparametric models. We derive nonparametric bounds on the average treatment effect when an imperfect instrument is available. As in Nevo and Rosen (2012), we assume…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-10-01 Kyunghoon Ban , Désiré Kédagni

The instrumental-variables (IV) setting is standard for partial identification of causal effects when unobserved confounding makes point identification impossible. Existing approaches face methodological bottlenecks: closed-form bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Vahid Balazadeh , Hamidreza Kamkari , Medha Barath , Ricardo Silva , Rahul G. Krishnan

Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Peng Wu , Haoxuan Li , Chunyuan Zheng , Yan Zeng , Jiawei Chen , Yang Liu , Ruocheng Guo , Kun Zhang

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in employing flexible machine learning models for instrumental variable (IV) regression, but the development of uncertainty quantification methodology is still lacking. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-04 Ziyu Wang , Yuhao Zhou , Tongzheng Ren , Jun Zhu

Counterfactual inference is a powerful tool, capable of solving challenging problems in high-profile sectors. To perform counterfactual inference, one requires knowledge of the underlying causal mechanisms. However, causal mechanisms cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-23 Athanasios Vlontzos , Bernhard Kainz , Ciaran M. Gilligan-Lee

Causal effect estimation from observational data is an important and much studied research topic. The instrumental variable (IV) and local causal discovery (LCD) patterns are canonical examples of settings where a closed-form expression…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-19 Ioan Gabriel Bucur , Tom Claassen , Tom Heskes

This paper introduces a simple framework of counterfactual estimation for causal inference with time-series cross-sectional data, in which we estimate the average treatment effect on the treated by directly imputing counterfactual outcomes…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-16 Licheng Liu , Ye Wang , Yiqing Xu

Recently, there has been a surge in methodological development for the difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to evaluate causal effects. Standard methods in the literature rely on the parallel trends assumption to identify the average…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-17 Pan Zhao , Yifan Cui

In randomized trials, researchers are often interested in mediation analysis to understand how a treatment works, in particular how much of a treatment's effect is mediated by an intermediated variable and how much the treatment directly…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-01-01 Dylan S. Small

Mediation analysis aims at disentangling the effects of a treatment on an outcome through alternative causal mechanisms and has become a popular practice in biomedical and social science applications. The causal framework based on…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-27 Allan Jerolon , Laura Baglietto , Etienne Birmele , Vittorio Perduca , Flora Alarcon

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

Estimating an individual's potential outcomes under counterfactual treatments is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, impulse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-13 Yulun Wu , Layne C. Price , Zichen Wang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Robert A. Barton , George Karypis