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Causal mediation analysis has been extended to estimate path-specific effects with multiple intermediate variables, isolating treatment effects through a mediator of interest while excluding pathways through its ancestors. Such analyses…

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

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…

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

Proxy variables are commonly used in causal inference when unmeasured confounding exists. While most existing proximal methods assume a unidirectional causal relationship between two primary variables, many social and biological systems…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-21 Jiaqi Min , Xueyue Zhang , Shanshan Luo

Identifying causal effects in the presence of unmeasured variables is a fundamental challenge in causal inference, for which proxy variable methods have emerged as a powerful solution. We contrast two major approaches in this framework: (1)…

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

Making causal inferences from observational studies can be challenging when confounders are missing not at random. In such cases, identifying causal effects is often not guaranteed. Motivated by a real example, we consider a…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-31 Jian Sun , Bo Fu

Estimating the effect of intervention from observational data while accounting for confounding variables is a key task in causal inference. Oftentimes, the confounders are unobserved, but we have access to large amounts of additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Shachi Deshpande , Kaiwen Wang , Dhruv Sreenivas , Zheng Li , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Assessing causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is challenging. Although auxiliary variables, such as instrumental variables, are commonly used to identify causal effects, they are often unavailable in practice due to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Kang Shuai , Shanshan Luo , Yue Zhang , Feng Xie , Yangbo He

We study the identification of causal effects, motivated by two improvements to identifiability which can be attained if one knows that some variables in a causal graph are functionally determined by their parents (without needing to know…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Yizuo Chen , Adnan Darwiche

Discovering causal relations is fundamental to reasoning and intelligence. In particular, observational causal discovery algorithms estimate the cause-effect relation between two random entities $X$ and $Y$, given $n$ samples from $P(X,Y)$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-24 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Marco Baroni , David Lopez-Paz

Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the pillars of science; nevertheless, they rely on hand-crafted hypotheses and expensive analysis. Such constraints prevent causal effect estimation at scale, potentially anchoring on popular yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tommaso Mencattini , Riccardo Cadei , Francesco Locatello

Who should we prioritize for treatment when causal effects cannot be estimated? In practice, organizations often rely on predictive proxies: ads are targeted using purchase probabilities, and retention incentives are allocated using…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Carlos Fernández-Loría , Jorge Loría

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-20 Alexander D'Amour

NOTE: This preprint has a flawed theoretical formulation. Please avoid it and refer to the ICLR22 publication https://openreview.net/forum?id=q7n2RngwOM. Also, arXiv:2109.15062 contains some new ideas on unobserved Confounding. As an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-22 Pengzhou Wu , Kenji Fukumizu

Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-04 Rajesh Ranganath , Adler Perotte

Suppose that we are interested in the average causal effect of a binary treatment on an outcome when this relationship is confounded by a binary confounder. Suppose that the confounder is unobserved but a nondifferential proxy of it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-25 Jose M. Peña

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

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a crucial but challenging task. Currently, only a limited number of data-driven causal effect estimation methods are available. These methods either provide only a bound estimation of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-10 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Lee , Jixue Liu

Suppose that we are interested in the average causal effect of a binary treatment on an outcome when this relationship is confounded by a binary confounder. Suppose that the confounder is unobserved but a non-differential binary proxy of it…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-29 Jose M. Peña

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