English
Related papers

Related papers: Demystifying Proximal Causal Inference

200 papers

A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariate strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-24 Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen , Andrew Ying , Yifan Cui , Xu Shi , Wang Miao

Causality inference is prone to spurious causal interactions, due to the substantial confounders in a complex system. While many existing methods based on the statistical methods or dynamical methods attempt to address misidentification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Jinling Yan , Shao-Wu Zhang , Chihao Zhang , Weitian Huang , Jifan Shi , Luonan Chen

Causal inference from observational data often rests on the unverifiable assumption of no unmeasured confounding. Recently, Tchetgen Tchetgen and colleagues have introduced proximal inference to leverage negative control outcomes and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-08-10 Raluca Cobzaru , Roy Welsch , Stan Finkelstein , Kenney Ng , Zach Shahn

Recent text-based causal methods attempt to mitigate confounding bias by estimating proxies of confounding variables that are partially or imperfectly measured from unstructured text data. These approaches, however, assume analysts have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Jacob M. Chen , Rohit Bhattacharya , Katherine A. Keith

Detecting latent confounders from proxy variables is an essential problem in causal effect estimation. Previous approaches are limited to low-dimensional proxies, sorted proxies, and binary treatments. We remove these assumptions and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-22 Nathan Mankovich , Homer Durand , Emiliano Diaz , Gherardo Varando , Gustau Camps-Valls

In many scientific experiments, the data annotating cost constraints the pace for testing novel hypotheses. Yet, modern machine learning pipelines offer a promising solution, provided their predictions yield correct conclusions. We focus on…

Skepticism about the assumption of no unmeasured confounding, also known as exchangeability, is often warranted in making causal inferences from observational data; because exchangeability hinges on an investigator's ability to accurately…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-22 Yifan Cui , Hongming Pu , Xu Shi , Wang Miao , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

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

Observational studies are the primary source of data for causal inference, but it is challenging when existing unmeasured confounding. Missing data problems are also common in observational studies. How to obtain the causal effects from the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-15 Renzhong Zheng

A common concern when a policymaker draws causal inferences from and makes decisions based on observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding, i.e., the standard no…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-25 Tao Shen , Yifan Cui

Causal discovery is central to inferring causal relationships from observational data. In the presence of latent confounding, algorithms such as Fast Causal Inference (FCI) learn a Partial Ancestral Graph (PAG) representing the true model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Adèle H. Ribeiro , Dominik Heider

It is important to draw causal inference from observational studies, which, however, becomes challenging if the confounders have missing values. Generally, causal effects are not identifiable if the confounders are missing not at random. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-04 Shu Yang , Linbo Wang , Peng Ding

The principal stratification has become a popular tool to address a broad class of causal inference questions, particularly in dealing with non-compliance and truncation-by-death problems. The causal effects within principal strata which…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-20 Shanshan Luo , Wei Li , Wang Miao , Yangbo He

Unmeasured confounding, unethical exposure, and ill-defined interventions pose significant challenges to evaluating policy-relevant mediation estimands in medicine and public health. In observational studies involving harmful exposures, the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yang Bai , Yifan Cui , Baoluo Sun

This paper clarifies a fundamental difference between causal inference and traditional statistical inference by formalizing a mathematical distinction between their respective parameters. We connect two major approaches to causal inference,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-29 Muye Liu , Jun Xie

We provide new results for nonparametric identification, estimation, and inference of causal effects using `proxy controls': observables that are noisy but informative proxies for unobserved confounding factors. Our analysis applies to…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-22 Ben Deaner

Using observational data to estimate the effect of a treatment is a powerful tool for decision-making when randomized experiments are infeasible or costly. However, observational data often yields biased estimates of treatment effects,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-01 Tobias Hatt , Stefan Feuerriegel

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

A key challenge in causal inference from observational studies is the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for causal inference that…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-17 Ying Zhou , Dingke Tang , Dehan Kong , Linbo Wang

Causal effect identification considers whether an interventional probability distribution can be uniquely determined from a passively observed distribution in a given causal structure. If the generating system induces context-specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Santtu Tikka , Antti Hyttinen , Juha Karvanen