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Unobserved confounding is a fundamental obstacle to establishing valid causal conclusions from observational data. Two complementary types of approaches have been developed to address this obstacle: obtaining identification using fortuitous…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-27 Ilya Shpitser , Zach Wood-Doughty , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-03 Ricardo Silva , Robin Evans

In this work, we consider causal inference in various high-dimensional treatment settings, including for single multi-valued treatments and vector treatments with binary or continuous components, when the number of treatments can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-26 Patrick Kramer , Edward H. Kennedy , Isaac M. Opper

Instrumental variable methods are fundamental to causal inference when treatment assignment is confounded by unobserved variables. In this article, we develop a general nonparametric causal framework for identification and learning with…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-10 Shuyuan Chen , Peng Zhang , Yifan Cui

We address the setting of Proxy Causal Learning (PCL), which has the goal of estimating causal effects from observed data in the presence of hidden confounding. Proxy methods accomplish this task using two proxy variables related to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Bariscan Bozkurt , Ben Deaner , Dimitri Meunier , Liyuan Xu , Arthur Gretton

A causal decomposition analysis allows researchers to determine whether the difference in a health outcome between two groups can be attributed to a difference in each group's distribution of one or more modifiable mediator variables. With…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-09 Melissa J. Smith , Leslie A. McClure , D. Leann Long

Modern causal decision-making increasingly demands individualized treatment-effect estimation in networks where interventions are high-dimensional, combinatorial vectors. While network interference, effect heterogeneity, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Yunping Lu , Haoang Chi , Qirui Hu , Zhiheng Zhang

In the absence of data from a randomized trial, researchers often aim to use observational data to draw causal inference about the effect of a treatment on a time-to-event outcome. In this context, interest often focuses on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-15 Ted Westling , Alex Luedtke , Peter Gilbert , Marco Carone

To estimate direct and indirect effects of an exposure on an outcome from observed data strong assumptions about unconfoundedness are required. Since these assumptions cannot be tested using the observed data, a mediation analysis should…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-03-29 Anita Lindmark , Xavier de Luna , Marie Eriksson

This work extends causal inference with stochastic confounders. We propose a new approach to variational estimation for causal inference based on a representer theorem with a random input space. We estimate causal effects involving latent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-26 Thanh Vinh Vo , Pengfei Wei , Wicher Bergsma , Tze-Yun Leong

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…

We study the problem of selecting covariates for unbiased estimation of the total causal effect.Existing approaches typically rely on global causal structure learning over all variables, or on strong assumptions such as causal sufficiency -…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Zeyu Liu , Zheng Li , Feng Xie , Yan Zeng , Hao Zhang , Kun Zhang

Causal mediation analysis can unpack the black box of causality and is therefore a powerful tool for disentangling causal pathways in biomedical and social sciences, and also for evaluating machine learning fairness. To reduce bias for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-27 Siqi Xu , Lin Liu , Zhonghua Liu

Unmeasured confounding presents a significant challenge in causal inference from observational studies. Classical approaches often rely on collecting proxy variables, such as instrumental variables. However, in applications where the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-16 Xiaochuan Shi , Dehan Kong , Linbo Wang

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

We consider the problem of causal effect estimation with an unobserved confounder, where we observe a single proxy variable that is associated with the confounder. Although it has been shown that the recovery of an average causal effect is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-19 Liyuan Xu , Arthur Gretton

We study the estimation of causal parameters when not all confounders are observed and instead negative controls are available. Recent work has shown how these can enable identification and efficient estimation via two so-called bridge…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Masatoshi Uehara

We propose a novel approach for causal mediation analysis based on changes-in-changes assumptions restricting unobserved heterogeneity over time. This allows disentangling the causal effect of a binary treatment on a continuous outcome into…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-10-13 Martin Huber , Mark Schelker , Anthony Strittmatter

Understanding causal mechanisms is crucial for explaining and generalizing empirical phenomena. Causal mediation analysis offers statistical techniques to quantify the mediation effects. Although numerous methods have been developed for…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Jiawei Fu

Existing identification results in proximal causal inference often focus on marginal interventional distributions using standard outcome or treatment bridge functions. These methods do not generally identify joint interventional…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Constantin Schott