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Leveraging external controls -- relevant individual patient data under control from external trials or real-world data -- has the potential to reduce the cost of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) while increasing the proportion of trial…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-13 Yanyao Yi , Ying Zhang , Yu Du , Ting Ye

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) may suffer from limited scope. In particular, samples may be unrepresentative: some RCTs over- or under- sample individuals with certain characteristics compared to the target population, for which one…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-15 Bénédicte Colnet , Julie Josse , Gaël Varoquaux , Erwan Scornet

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

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating causal effects but are often costly and difficult to scale; consequently, they are frequently augmented with auxiliary external controls in many applications. Prior…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-28 Jiawei Shan , Yiteng Tu , Guanbo Wang , Chao Ying , Jiwei Zhao

Extending (generalizing or transporting) causal inferences from a randomized trial to a target population requires ``generalizability'' or ``transportability'' assumptions, which state that randomized and non-randomized individuals are…

Confounding is a significant obstacle to unbiased estimation of causal effects from observational data. For settings with high-dimensional covariates -- such as text data, genomics, or the behavioral social sciences -- researchers have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Katherine A. Keith , Sergey Feldman , David Jurgens , Jonathan Bragg , Rohit Bhattacharya

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are pivotal in generating internally valid estimates with minimal assumptions, serving as a cornerstone for researchers dedicated to advancing causal inference methods. However, extending these findings…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-28 Melody Y Huang , Harsh Parikh

We aim to generalize the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to a target population with the help of some observational data. This is a problem of causal effect identification with multiple data sources. Challenges arise when the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-15 Juha Karvanen

AI models are often evaluated based on their ability to predict the outcome of interest. However, in many AI for social impact applications, the presence of an intervention that affects the outcome can bias the evaluation. Randomized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Winston Chen , Michael W. Sjoding , Jenna Wiens

Covariate benchmarking is an important part of sensitivity analysis about omitted variable bias and can be used to bound the strength of the unobserved confounder using information and judgments about observed covariates. It is common to…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-06-21 Deepankar Basu

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are increasingly prevalent in education research, and are often regarded as a gold standard of causal inference. Two main virtues of randomized experiments are that they (1) do not suffer from…

Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are costly, time-consuming, and often infeasible, while treatment-effect estimation from observational data is limited by unobserved confounding. Methods: We developed a three-step framework…

We consider the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, where the distribution shift is due to an unobserved confounder ($Z$) affecting both the covariates ($X$) and the labels ($Y$). This confounding introduces heterogeneity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Parjanya Prashant , Seyedeh Baharan Khatami , Bruno Ribeiro , Babak Salimi

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) are the current gold standards to empirically measure the effect of a new drug. However, they may be of limited size and resorting to complementary non-randomized data, referred to as observational, is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-11 Ahmed Boughdiri , Julie Josse , Erwan Scornet

In observational studies, it is typically unrealistic to assume that treatments are randomly assigned, even conditional on adjusting for all observed covariates. Therefore, a sensitivity analysis is often needed to examine how hidden biases…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-18 Siyu Heng , Dylan S. Small

Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard when estimating the average treatment effect. However, they are usually not a random sample from the real-world population because of the inclusion/exclusion rules. Meanwhile, observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-11 Kuan Jiang , Wenjie Hu , Shu Yang , Xinxing Lai , Xiaohua Zhou

Unobserved effect modifiers can induce bias when generalizing causal effect estimates to target populations. In this work, we extend a sensitivity analysis framework assessing the robustness of study results to unobserved effect…

Background: Randomized controlled trials are often used to inform policy and practice for broad populations. The average treatment effect (ATE) for a target population, however, may be different from the ATE observed in a trial if there are…

When individuals participating in a randomized trial differ with respect to the distribution of effect modifiers compared compared with the target population where the trial results will be used, treatment effect estimates from the trial…

The ability of an agent to do well in new environments is a critical aspect of intelligence. In machine learning, this ability is known as $\textit{strong}$ or $\textit{out-of-distribution}$ generalization. However, merely considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Siyuan Guo , Jonas Wildberger , Bernhard Schölkopf