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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

Despite having achieved great success for sentiment analysis, existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis. This may be due to the fact that they may latch onto spurious correlations ("shortcuts", e.g., focusing only on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Siyin Wang , Jie Zhou , Changzhi Sun , Junjie Ye , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

A popular way to estimate the causal effect of a variable x on y from observational data is to use an instrumental variable (IV): a third variable z that affects y only through x. The more strongly z is associated with x, the more reliable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Zhaobin Kuang , Frederic Sala , Nimit Sohoni , Sen Wu , Aldo Córdova-Palomera , Jared Dunnmon , James Priest , Christopher Ré

In observational studies, treatments are typically not randomized and therefore estimated treatment effects may be subject to confounding bias. The instrumental variable (IV) design plays the role of a quasi-experimental handle since the IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-30 Lan Liu , Wang Miao , Baoluo Sun , James Robins , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Exogenous heterogeneity, for example, in the form of instrumental variables can help us learn a system's underlying causal structure and predict the outcome of unseen intervention experiments. In this paper, we consider linear models in…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-21 Niklas Pfister , Jonas Peters

Studies investigating the causal effects of spatially varying exposures on outcomes often rely on observational and spatially indexed data. A prevalent challenge is unmeasured spatial confounding, where an unobserved spatially varying…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-19 Sophie M. Woodward , Mauricio Tec , Francesca Dominici

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are central to causal inference from observational data, particularly when a randomized experiment is not feasible. However, of the three conventional core IV identification conditions, only one, IV…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-23 Zhonghua Liu , Baoluo Sun , Ting Ye , David Richardson , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Causal inference from longitudinal observational data is a challenging problem due to the difficulty in correctly identifying the time-dependent confounders, especially in the presence of latent time-dependent confounders. Instrumental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Debo Cheng , Ziqi Xu , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Wentao Gao , Thuc Duy Le

Nonlinear causal effects are prevalent in many research scenarios involving continuous exposures, and instrumental variables (IVs) can be employed to investigate such effects, particularly in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-29 Haodong Tian , Ashish Patel , Stephen Burgess

Instrumental-variable (IV) regression enables causal estimation under endogeneity, but modern IV problems often involve nonlinear structural effects and high-dimensional covariates. Existing nonlinear IV methods directly learn the causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Guyue Luo , Qiao Liu

In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Antti Pöllänen , Pekka Marttinen

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

Instrumental variable (IV) methods play a central role in causal inference, particularly in settings where treatment assignment is confounded by unobserved variables. IV methods have been extensively developed in recent years and applied…

Instrumental variables (IVs) are often continuous, arising in diverse fields such as economics, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Existing approaches for continuous IVs typically impose strong parametric models or assume homogeneous…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Mei Dong , Lin Liu , Dingke Tang , Geoffrey Liu , Wei Xu , Linbo Wang

Many treatment variables used in empirical applications nest multiple unobserved versions of a treatment. I show that instrumental variable (IV) estimands for the effect of a composite treatment are IV-specific weighted averages of effects…

General Economics · Economics 2022-11-24 Clint Harris

This paper proposes semi-instrumental variables (semi-IVs) as an alternative to instrumental variables (IVs) to identify the causal effect of a binary (or discrete) endogenous treatment. A semi-IV is a less restrictive form of instrument:…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-23 Christophe Bruneel-Zupanc

We address the problem of causal effect estimation where hidden confounders are present, with a focus on two settings: instrumental variable regression with additional observed confounders, and proxy causal learning. Our approach uses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Haotian Sun , Antoine Moulin , Tongzheng Ren , Arthur Gretton , Bo Dai

Causal inference is capable of estimating the treatment effect (i.e., the causal effect of treatment on the outcome) to benefit the decision making in various domains. One fundamental challenge in this research is that the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Qian Li , Zhichao Wang , Shaowu Liu , Gang Li , Guandong Xu

A common issue in learning decision-making policies in data-rich settings is spurious correlations in the offline dataset, which can be caused by hidden confounders. Instrumental variable (IV) regression, which utilises a key unconfounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Daqian Shao , Ashkan Soleymani , Francesco Quinzan , Marta Kwiatkowska

Causal representation learning aims to unveil latent high-level causal representations from observed low-level data. One of its primary tasks is to provide reliable assurance of identifying these latent causal models, known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yuhang Liu , Zhen Zhang , Dong Gong , Mingming Gong , Biwei Huang , Anton van den Hengel , Kun Zhang , Javen Qinfeng Shi