相关论文: Comment on "Blessings of Multiple Causes"

This note has been updated (April, 2020) to respond to "Towards Clarifying the Theory of the Deconfounder" by Yixin Wang, David M. Blei (arXiv:2003.04948). This original note, posted in January, 2020, is meant to complement our previous…

The aim of this comment (set to appear in a formal discussion in JASA) is to draw out some conclusions from an extended back-and-forth I have had with Wang and Blei regarding the deconfounder method proposed in "The Blessings of Multiple…

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)…

This commentary has two goals. We first critically review the deconfounder method and point out its advantages and limitations. We then briefly consider three possible ways to address some of the limitations of the deconfounder method.

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…

Wang and Blei (2019) studies multiple causal inference and proposes the deconfounder algorithm. The paper discusses theoretical requirements and presents empirical studies. Several refinements have been suggested around the theory of the…

Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both…

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…

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…

A major challenge in estimating treatment effects in observational studies is the reliance on untestable conditions such as the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can falsify the assumption…

A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify this assumption from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms…

Ogburn et al. (2019, arXiv:1910.05438) discuss "The Blessings of Multiple Causes" (Wang and Blei, 2018, arXiv:1805.06826). Many of their remarks are interesting. But they also claim that the paper has "foundational errors" and that its…

Inferring causal effects of a treatment, intervention or policy from observational data is central to many applications. However, state-of-the-art methods for causal inference seldom consider the possibility that covariates have missing…

This paper addresses the problem of measurement errors in causal inference and highlights several algebraic and graphical methods for eliminating systematic bias induced by such errors. In particulars, the paper discusses the control of…

Unmeasured confounding is a major challenge for identifying causal relationships from non-experimental data. Here, we propose a method that can accommodate unmeasured discrete confounding. Extending recent identifiability results in deep…

Identification of treatment effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is a persistent problem in the social, biological, and medical sciences. The problem of unmeasured confounding in settings with multiple treatments is most common…

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…