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Estimating the causal effects of interventions is crucial to policy and decision-making, yet outcome data are often missing or subject to non-standard measurement error. While ground-truth outcomes can sometimes be obtained through costly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-22 Ezinne Nwankwo , Lauri Goldkind , Angela Zhou

Causal effect identification considers whether an interventional probability distribution can be uniquely determined without parametric assumptions from measured source distributions and structural knowledge on the generating system. While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-30 Santtu Tikka , Antti Hyttinen , Juha Karvanen

Indirect experiments provide a valuable framework for estimating treatment effects in situations where conducting randomized control trials (RCTs) is impractical or unethical. Unlike RCTs, indirect experiments estimate treatment effects by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Emma Brunskill

In this paper we propose a new template for empirical studies intended to assess causal effects: the outcome-wide longitudinal design. The approach is an extension of what is often done to assess the causal effects of a treatment or…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-25 Tyler J. VanderWeele , Maya B. Mathur , Ying Chen

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Helen Guo , Ilya Shpitser , Elizabeth L. Ogburn

Estimating causal effects from observational data informs us about which factors are important in an autonomous system, and enables us to take better decisions. This is important because it has applications in selecting a treatment in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Plabon Shaha , Talha Islam Zadid , Ismat Rahman , Md. Mosaddek Khan

Evaluating the causal impacts of possible interventions is crucial for informing decision-making, especially towards improving access to opportunity. However, if causal effects are heterogeneous and predictable from covariates, personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Ezinne Nwankwo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

Estimating a causal query from observational data is an essential task in the analysis of biomolecular networks. Estimation takes as input a network topology, a query estimation method, and observational measurements on the network…

Randomized controlled trials generate experimental variation that can credibly identify causal effects, but often suffer from limited scale, while observational datasets are large, but often violate desired identification assumptions. To…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-27 George Z. Gui

In the field of road safety, it is common to use responsibility analyses to assess the effect of a given factor on the risk of being responsible for an accident, among drivers involved in an accident only. Even if this design is now widely…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-16 Marine Dufournet , Emilie Lanoy , Jean-Louis Martin , Vivian Viallon

N-of-1 experiments, where a unit serves as its own control and treatment in different time windows, have been used in certain medical contexts for decades. However, due to effects that accumulate over long time windows and interventions…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-25 Tengyuan Liang , Benjamin Recht

One approach for increasing the efficiency of randomized trials is the use of "external controls" -- individuals who received the control treatment studied in the trial during routine practice or in prior experimental studies. Existing…

Causal inference, as a major research area in statistics and data science, plays a central role across diverse fields such as medicine, economics, education, and the social sciences. Design-based causal inference begins with randomized…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-01 Xin Lu , Wanjia Fu , Hongzi Li , Haoyang Yu , Honghao Zhang , Ke Zhu , Hanzhong Liu

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

Identifying the effects of new interventions from data is a significant challenge found across a wide range of the empirical sciences. A well-known strategy for identifying such effects is Pearl's front-door (FD) criterion (Pearl, 1995).…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-17 Hyunchai Jeong , Jin Tian , Elias Bareinboim

This paper discusses the fundamental principles of causal inference - the area of statistics that estimates the effect of specific occurrences, treatments, interventions, and exposures on a given outcome from experimental and observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-03 Francesca Dominici , Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi , Fabrizia Mealli

The treatment assignment mechanism in a randomized clinical trial can be optimized for statistical efficiency within a specified class of randomization mechanisms. Optimal designs of this type have been characterized in terms of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-03 Wei Zhang , Zhiwei Zhang , Aiyi Liu

To design Bayesian studies, criteria for the operating characteristics of posterior analyses - such as power and the type I error rate - are often assessed by estimating sampling distributions of posterior probabilities via simulation. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-17 Luke Hagar , Nathaniel T. Stevens

Given a causal graph, the do-calculus can express treatment effects as functionals of the observational joint distribution that can be estimated empirically. Sometimes the do-calculus identifies multiple valid formulae, prompting us to…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-15 Shantanu Gupta , Zachary C. Lipton , David Childers

Causal inference problems often involve continuous treatments, such as dose, duration, or frequency. However, identifying and estimating standard dose-response estimands requires that everyone has some chance of receiving any level of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-28 Kyle Schindl , Shuying Shen , Edward H. Kennedy