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Faced with data-driven policies, individuals will manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions. While earlier works cast these manipulations as undesirable gaming, recent works have adopted a more nuanced causal framing in which…
Algorithmic decisions about individuals require predictions that are not only accurate but also fair with respect to sensitive attributes such as gender and race. Causal notions of fairness align with legal requirements, yet many methods…
Learning causal relationships between variables is a well-studied problem in statistics, with many important applications in science. However, modeling real-world systems remain challenging, as most existing algorithms assume that the…
We address the challenge of inferring causal effects in social network data. This results in challenges due to interference -- where a unit's outcome is affected by neighbors' treatments -- and network-induced confounding factors. While…
This paper focuses on the computational complexity of computing empirical plug-in estimates for causal effect queries. Given a causal graph and observational data, any identifiable causal query can be estimated from an expression over the…
In addition to efficient statistical estimators of a treatment's effect, successful application of causal inference requires specifying assumptions about the mechanisms underlying observed data and testing whether they are valid, and to…
In this essay I discuss potential outcome and graphical approaches to causality, and their relevance for empirical work in economics. I review some of the work on directed acyclic graphs, including the recent "The Book of Why," by Pearl and…
Pearl's front-door criterion provides a set of sufficient conditions for estimating the total causal effect from observational data in the presence of latent confounding, using the functional P(y | do(x := x*)) = \sum_z P(z | x*) \sum_x P(y…
The research questions that motivate transportation safety studies are causal in nature. Safety researchers typically use observational data to answer such questions, but often without appropriate causal inference methodology. The field of…
Causal inference is a critical task across fields such as healthcare, economics, and the social sciences. While recent advances in machine learning, especially those based on the deep-learning architectures, have shown potential in…
Proximal causal inference was recently proposed as a framework to identify causal effects from observational data in the presence of hidden confounders for which proxies are available. In this paper, we extend the proximal causal inference…
Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature, where complete algorithms have been proposed to identify causal queries of interest. The validity of these algorithms hinges on the restrictive assumption of having…
Unmeasured confounding, unethical exposure, and ill-defined interventions pose significant challenges to evaluating policy-relevant mediation estimands in medicine and public health. In observational studies involving harmful exposures, the…
We present a precise definition of cause and effect in terms of a fundamental notion called unresponsiveness. Our definition is based on Savage's (1954) formulation of decision theory and departs from the traditional view of causation in…
Causal inference analysis is the estimation of the effects of actions on outcomes. In the context of healthcare data this means estimating the outcome of counter-factual treatments (i.e. including treatments that were not observed) on a…
Defining and identifying causal intervention effects for transmissible infectious disease outcomes is challenging because a treatment -- such as a vaccine -- given to one individual may affect the infection outcomes of others.…
We study a constructive algorithm that approximates Gateaux derivatives for statistical functionals by finite differencing, with a focus on functionals that arise in causal inference. We study the case where probability distributions are…
This paper studies causal inference with observational data from a single large network. We consider a nonparametric model with interference in both potential outcomes and selection into treatment. Specifically, both stages may be the…
In contrast to problems of interference in (exogenous) treatments, models of interference in unit-specific (endogenous) outcomes do not usually produce a reduced-form representation where outcomes depend on other units' treatment status…
This paper studies the problem of learning the correlation structure of a set of intervention functions defined on the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a causal model. This is useful when we are interested in jointly learning the causal…