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Confounding matters in almost all observational studies that focus on causality. In order to eliminate bias caused by connfounders, oftentimes a substantial number of features need to be collected in the analysis. In this case, large p…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-30 Shinyuu Lee , Yuru Zhu

Many applications of computational social science aim to infer causal conclusions from non-experimental data. Such observational data often contains confounders, variables that influence both potential causes and potential effects.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Katherine A. Keith , David Jensen , Brendan O'Connor

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-15 Sam Witty , Kenta Takatsu , David Jensen , Vikash Mansinghka

In most nonrandomized observational studies, differences between treatment groups may arise not only due to the treatment but also because of the effect of confounders. Therefore, causal inference regarding the treatment effect is not as…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-04 Debashis Ghosh

Causal inference studies using textual social media data can provide actionable insights on human behavior. Making accurate causal inferences with text requires controlling for confounding which could otherwise impart bias. Recently, many…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Galen Weld , Peter West , Maria Glenski , David Arbour , Ryan Rossi , Tim Althoff

A key condition for obtaining reliable estimates of the causal effect of a treatment is overlap (a.k.a. positivity): the distributions of the features used to perform causal adjustment cannot be too different in the treated and control…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-14 Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…

Applications · Statistics 2025-06-24 Caren Marzban , Yikun Zhang , Nicholas Bond , Michael Richman

Explaining machine learning (ML) predictions has become crucial as ML models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. While SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is widely used for model interpretability, it fails…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Woon Yee Ng , Li Rong Wang , Siyuan Liu , Xiuyi Fan

The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Olivier Jeunen , Ciarán M. Gilligan-Lee , Rishabh Mehrotra , Mounia Lalmas

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

In this paper, we discuss causal inference on the efficacy of a treatment or medication on a time-to-event outcome with competing risks. Although the treatment group can be randomized, there can be confoundings between the compliance and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-06 Cheng Zheng , Ran Dai , Parameswaran Hari , Mei-Jie Zhang

Much research has been devoted to the problem of estimating treatment effects from observational data; however, most methods assume that the observed variables only contain confounders, i.e., variables that affect both the treatment and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Weijia Zhang , Lin Liu , Jiuyong Li

Unobserved confounding is a major hurdle for causal inference from observational data. Confounders---the variables that affect both the causes and the outcome---induce spurious non-causal correlations between the two. Wang & Blei (2018)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-31 Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

Researchers in explainable artificial intelligence have developed numerous methods for helping users understand the predictions of complex supervised learning models. By contrast, explaining the $\textit{uncertainty}$ of model outputs has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 David S. Watson , Joshua O'Hara , Niek Tax , Richard Mudd , Ido Guy

Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Wei Li , Jiapeng Liu , Peng Ding , Zhi Geng

Shapley value is a popular approach for measuring the influence of individual features. While Shapley feature attribution is built upon desiderata from game theory, some of its constraints may be less natural in certain machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Yongchan Kwon , James Zou

Feature attributions are a common paradigm for model explanations due to their simplicity in assigning a single numeric score for each input feature to a model. In the actionable recourse setting, wherein the goal of the explanations is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Emanuele Albini , Jason Long , Danial Dervovic , Daniele Magazzeni

Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-04-24 Priyantha Wijayatunga

We address modelling and computational issues for multiple treatment effect inference under many potential confounders. Our main contribution is providing a trade-off between preventing the omission of relevant confounders, while not…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-04 Omiros Papaspiliopoulos , David Rossell , Miquel Torrens-i-Dinarès

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