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Related papers: Demystifying Proximal Causal Inference

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Empirical researchers are often interested in not only whether a treatment affects an outcome of interest, but also how the treatment effect arises. Causal mediation analysis provides a formal framework to identify causal mechanisms through…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-02-01 Bora Kim

In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-26 Jiajing Zheng , Jiaxi Wu , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Modern medical research demands specialized causal inference methods evaluating complex continuous-time dynamic treatment regimens using observational data. For instance, obtaining the causal effects of intravenous administration, a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Haiyan Zhu , Yingchun Zhou

Causal inference identifies cause-and-effect relationships between variables. While traditional approaches rely on data to reveal causal links, a recently developed method, assimilative causal inference (ACI), integrates observations with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Marios Andreou , Nan Chen

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 estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-06 Dimitris Bertsimas , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

An important problem in causal inference is to break down the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into different causal pathways and to quantify the causal effect in each pathway. For instance, in causal fairness, the total effect of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-10 Lu Cheng , Ruocheng Guo , Huan Liu

This paper deals with the problem of evaluating the causal effect using observational data in the presence of an unobserved exposure/ outcome variable, when cause-effect relationships between variables can be described as a directed acyclic…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-06-18 Manabu Kuroki , Zhihong Cai

Recommendation systems aim to predict users' feedback on items not exposed to them. Confounding bias arises due to the presence of unmeasured variables (e.g., the socio-economic status of a user) that can affect both a user's exposure and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Qing Zhang , Xiaoying Zhang , Yang Liu , Hongning Wang , Min Gao , Jiheng Zhang , Ruocheng Guo

Causal inference in observational studies can be challenging when confounders are subject to missingness. Generally, the identification of causal effects is not guaranteed even under restrictive parametric model assumptions when confounders…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-23 Jian Sun , Bo Fu

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

Causal discovery from data affected by unobserved variables is an important but difficult problem to solve. The effects that unobserved variables have on the relationships between observed variables are more complex in nonlinear cases than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Takashi Nicholas Maeda , Shohei Shimizu

The fundamental challenge of drawing causal inference is that counterfactual outcomes are not fully observed for any unit. Furthermore, in observational studies, treatment assignment is likely to be confounded. Many statistical methods have…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-01 Harsh Parikh , Carlos Varjao , Louise Xu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Many real-world decision-making tasks require learning causal relationships between a set of variables. Traditional causal discovery methods, however, require that all variables are observed, which is often not feasible in practical…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-27 Raj Agrawal , Chandler Squires , Neha Prasad , Caroline Uhler

A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-07 Rickard K. A. Karlsson , Jesse H. Krijthe

Machine learning predictions are increasingly used to supplement incomplete or costly-to-measure outcomes in fields such as biomedical research, environmental science, and social science. However, treating predictions as ground truth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-29 Yilin Song , Dan M. Kluger , Harsh Parikh , Tian Gu

Inferring causal effects of a treatment, intervention or policy from observational data is central to many applications. However, state-of-the-art methods for causal inference seldom consider the possibility that covariates have missing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-26 Imke Mayer , Julie Josse , Félix Raimundo , Jean-Philippe Vert

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-01 Roy S. Zawadzki , Joshua D. Grill , Daniel L. Gillen

Instrumental variable (IV) and proximal causal learning (Proxy) methods are central frameworks for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. Despite substantial methodological advances, existing approaches rarely provide…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Yuqi Zhang , Krikamol Muandet , Dino Sejdinovic , Edwin Fong , Siu Lun Chau