Related papers: Proximal Causal Inference for Hidden Outcomes
Latent confounders---unobserved variables that influence both treatment and outcome---can bias estimates of causal effects. In some cases, these confounders are shared across observations, e.g. all students taking a course are influenced by…
A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariate strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism…
In this paper we give a brief review of semiparametric theory, using as a running example the common problem of estimating an average causal effect. Semiparametric models allow at least part of the data-generating process to be unspecified…
Causal influence measures for machine learnt classifiers shed light on the reasons behind classification, and aid in identifying influential input features and revealing their biases. However, such analyses involve evaluating the classifier…
In social science researches, causal inference regarding peer effects often faces significant challenges due to homophily bias and contextual confounding. For example, unmeasured health conditions (e.g., influenza) and psychological states…
Latent variable models provide a powerful framework for incorporating and inferring unobserved factors in observational data. In causal inference, they help account for hidden factors influencing treatment or outcome, thereby addressing…
Statistical prediction models are often trained on data from different probability distributions than their eventual use cases. One approach to proactively prepare for these shifts harnesses the intuition that causal mechanisms should…
Granger causality analysis, as one of the most popular time series causality methods, has been widely used in the economics, neuroscience. However, unobserved confounders is a fundamental problem in the observational studies, which is still…
This paper studies the problem of estimating the contributions of features to the prediction of a specific instance by a machine learning model and the overall contribution of a feature to the model. The causal effect of a feature…
Empirical researchers increasingly use upstream machine-learning (ML) methods to construct proxies for latent target variables from complex, unstructured data. A naive plug-in use of such proxies in downstream econometric models, however,…
Given two sets of elements (such as cell types and drug compounds), researchers typically only have access to a limited subset of their interactions. The task of causal imputation involves using this subset to predict unobserved…
Estimating causal effects under networked interference from observational data is a crucial yet challenging problem. Most existing methods mainly rely on the networked unconfoundedness assumption, which guarantees the identification of…
The estimation of causal effects using quasiexperiments often relies on the use of unusual or serendipitous sources of exogenous variation. When the goal is estimating the same causal effects across many different settings, the same unusual…
Inferring the effect of interventions within complex systems is a fundamental problem of statistics. A widely studied approach employs structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables.…
We describe a design-based framework for drawing causal inference in general randomized experiments. Causal effects are defined as linear functionals evaluated at unit-level potential outcome functions. Assumptions about the potential…
Epidemiologists increasingly use causal inference methods that rely on machine learning, as these approaches can relax unnecessary model specification assumptions. While deriving and studying asymptotic properties of such estimators is a…
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…
We develop a criterion to certify whether causal effects are identifiable in linear structural equation models with latent variables. Linear structural equation models correspond to directed graphs whose nodes represent the random variables…
We propose a new nonparametric modeling framework for causal inference when outcomes depend on how agents are linked in a social or economic network. Such network interference describes a large literature on treatment spillovers, social…
Causal inference with observational data can be performed under an assumption of no unobserved confounders (unconfoundedness assumption). There is, however, seldom clear subject-matter or empirical evidence for such an assumption. We…