Related papers: ConfoundingSHAP: Quantifying confounding strength …

We introduce a variable importance measure to quantify the impact of individual input variables to a black box function. Our measure is based on the Shapley value from cooperative game theory. Many measures of variable importance operate by…

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…

Reliable treatment effect estimation from observational data depends on the availability of all confounding information. While much work has targeted treatment effect estimation from observational data, there is relatively little work in…

Among explainability techniques, SHAP stands out as one of the most popular, but often overlooks the causal structure of the problem. In response, do-SHAP employs interventional queries, but its reliance on estimands hinders its practical…

Inferring user preferences from the historical feedback of users is a valuable problem in recommender systems. Conventional approaches often rely on the assumption that user preferences in the feedback data are equivalent to the real user…

Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…

The Shapley value concept from cooperative game theory has become a popular technique for interpreting ML models, but efficiently estimating these values remains challenging, particularly in the model-agnostic setting. Here, we revisit the…

We propose a method to distinguish causal influence from hidden confounding in the following scenario: given a target variable Y, potential causal drivers X, and a large number of background features, we propose a novel criterion for…

Estimation of causal effects involves crucial assumptions about the data-generating process, such as directionality of effect, presence of instrumental variables or mediators, and whether all relevant confounders are observed. Violation of…

Causal inference from observational data often assumes "ignorability," that all confounders are observed. This assumption is standard yet untestable. However, many scientific studies involve multiple causes, different variables whose…

Clinical trials traditionally employ blinding as a design mechanism to reduce the influence of placebo effects. In practice, however, it can be difficult or impossible to blind study participants and unblinded trials are common in medical…

This paper studies inference on treatment effects in panel data settings with unobserved confounding. We model outcome variables through a factor model with random factors and loadings. Such factors and loadings may act as unobserved…

A key to causal inference with observational data is achieving balance in predictive features associated with each treatment type. Recent literature has explored representation learning to achieve this goal. In this work, we discuss the…

We discuss promising recent contributions on quantifying feature relevance using Shapley values, where we observed some confusion on which probability distribution is the right one for dropped features. We argue that the confusion is based…

Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to…

To uncover the city's fundamental functioning mechanisms, it is important to acquire a deep understanding of complicated relationships among citizens, location, and mobility behaviors. Previous research studies have applied direct…

Proximal causal inference (PCI) has emerged as a promising framework for identifying and estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounders. While many traditional causal inference methods rely on the assumption of no…

Feature selection is one of the most relevant processes in any methodology for creating a statistical learning model. Usually, existing algorithms establish some criterion to select the most influential variables, discarding those that do…

Predictive black-box models can exhibit high accuracy but their opaque nature hinders their uptake in safety-critical deployment environments. Explanation methods (XAI) can provide confidence for decision-making through increased…

Game-theoretic formulations of feature importance have become popular as a way to "explain" machine learning models. These methods define a cooperative game between the features of a model and distribute influence among these input elements…