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Evaluating hypothetical statements about how the world would be had a different course of action been taken is arguably one key capability expected from modern AI systems. Counterfactual reasoning underpins discussions in fairness, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Kevin Xia , Yushu Pan , Elias Bareinboim

Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-05-17 Anders Ledberg

This paper studies the cumulative causal effects of sequential treatments in the presence of unmeasured confounders. It is a critical issue in sequential decision-making scenarios where treatment decisions and outcomes dynamically evolve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Yingrong Wang , Anpeng Wu , Baohong Li , Ziyang Xiao , Ruoxuan Xiong , Qing Han , Kun Kuang

Estimating how a treatment affects different individuals, known as heterogeneous treatment effect estimation, is an important problem in empirical sciences. In the last few years, there has been a considerable interest in adapting machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Christopher Tran , Keith Burghardt , Kristina Lerman , Elena Zheleva

In this work we propose a different surgical modified model for the construction of counterfactual variables under non parametric structural equation models. This approach allows the simultaneous representation of counterfactual responses…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-10-08 Julieta Molina , Lucio Pantazis , Mariela Sued

Predicting counterfactual outcomes in longitudinal data, where sequential treatment decisions heavily depend on evolving patient states, is critical yet notoriously challenging due to complex time-dependent confounding and inadequate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Farbod Alinezhad , Jianfei Cao , Gary J. Young , Brady Post

Counterfactual estimation using synthetic controls is one of the most successful recent methodological developments in causal inference. Despite its popularity, the current description only considers time series aligned across units and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-03 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

Estimating the effect of intervention from observational data while accounting for confounding variables is a key task in causal inference. Oftentimes, the confounders are unobserved, but we have access to large amounts of additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Shachi Deshpande , Kaiwen Wang , Dhruv Sreenivas , Zheng Li , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Marginal structural models (MSMs) are often used to estimate causal effects of treatments on survival time outcomes from observational data when time-dependent confounding may be present. They can be fitted using, e.g., inverse probability…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-27 Shaun R Seaman , Ruth H Keogh

Causal analyses of longitudinal data generally assume that the qualitative causal structure relating variables remains invariant over time. In structured systems that transition between qualitatively different states in discrete time steps,…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-11 Ranjani Srinivasan , Jaron Lee , Rohit Bhattacharya , Narges Ahmidi , Ilya Shpitser

Counterfactual estimation over time is important in various applications, such as personalized medicine. However, time-dependent confounding bias in observational data still poses a significant challenge in achieving accurate and efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Nghia D. Nguyen , Pablo Robles-Granda , Lav R. Varshney

Identifying effects of actions (treatments) on outcome variables from observational data and causal assumptions is a fundamental problem in causal inference. This identification is made difficult by the presence of confounders which can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-03-19 Ilya Shpitser , Tyler VanderWeele , James M. Robins

Predicting the impact of treatments from observational data only still represents a majorchallenge despite recent significant advances in time series modeling. Treatment assignments are usually correlated with the predictors of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Edward De Brouwer , Javier González Hernández , Stephanie Hyland

This paper investigates how certain relationship between observed and counterfactual distributions serves as an identifying condition for treatment effects when the treatment is endogenous, and shows that this condition holds in a range of…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-11-28 Sukjin Han , Haiqing Xu

This study demonstrates the existence of a testable condition for the identification of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data, which relies on two sets of variables: observed covariates to be controlled for…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Martin Huber , Jannis Kueck

This paper considers the identification of dynamic treatment effects with panel data, in complex designs where the treatment may not be binary and may not be absorbing. We first show that under no-anticipation and parallel-trends…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-23 Clément de Chaisemartin , Xavier D'Haultfœuille

Referred to as the third rung of the causal inference ladder, counterfactual queries typically ask the "What if ?" question retrospectively. The standard approach to estimate counterfactuals resides in using a structural equation model that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Edward De Brouwer

Counterfactual inference has become a ubiquitous tool in online advertisement, recommendation systems, medical diagnosis, and econometrics. Accurate modeling of outcome distributions associated with different interventions -- known as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-13 Krikamol Muandet , Motonobu Kanagawa , Sorawit Saengkyongam , Sanparith Marukatat

Estimation of temporal counterfactual outcomes from observed history is crucial for decision-making in many domains such as healthcare and e-commerce, particularly when randomized controlled trials (RCTs) suffer from high cost or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Chuizheng Meng , Yihe Dong , Sercan Ö. Arık , Yan Liu , Tomas Pfister

We extend the definition of the marginal causal effect to the continuous treatment setting and develop a novel characterization of causal bias in the framework of structural causal models. We prove that our derived bias expression is zero…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-01 Gianluca Detommaso , Michael Brückner , Philip Schulz , Victor Chernozhukov