KRCD detects unobserved confounders in nonlinear observational data.
problem Detecting unobserved confounders in nonlinear observational studies.
method Kernel Regression Confounder Detection (KRCD) using reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
result KRCD outperforms existing methods and achieves superior computational efficiency.
Develops Austen plots for assessing bias from unobserved confounding in observational studies.
problem Bias in causal estimates due to unobserved confounding.
method Formalizes confounding strength, uses Austen plots to visualize and quantify bias.
result Allows domain experts to assess the plausibility of strong confounders.
We study the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational data while accounting for possible unobserved confounding. Previous approaches, which assume unconfoundedness, i.e., that no unobserved confounders affect both the treatment assignment as well as outcome, can lead to policies that introd…
We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from observational data with unobserved confounders. The CATE function maps baseline covariates to individual causal effect predictions and is key for personalized assessments. Recent work has focused on how to learn CATE under unconfoundedne…
Kernel methods identify treatment effects with unobserved confounding using negative controls.
problem Learning causal relationships with unmeasured confounding.
method Kernel ridge regression algorithms for nonparametric treatment effects.
result Uniform consistency and finite sample rates of convergence proved.
A new method uses randomized trials to estimate the strength of unobserved confounding.
problem Unobserved confounding compromises causal conclusions from non-randomized studies.
method Designs a statistical test to detect unobserved confounding strength and estimates a lower bound.
result Estimates an asymptotically valid lower bound on unobserved confounding strength.
Valid causal inference with unobserved confounding in high-dimensional settings.
problem Estimating causal effects with unobserved confounders in high-dimensional data.
method Proposes methods to estimate causal effects with valid confidence intervals in the presence of unobserved confounders and high-dimensional nuisance models.
result Valid semiparametric inference can be obtained with unobserved confounding, and uncertainty intervals are proposed.
New method estimates policy performance under unobserved confounding.
problem Estimating policy performance when decisions depend on unobserved variables.
method Developed worst-case bounds for robust OPE under unobserved confounding.
result Efficient procedure for computing worst-case bounds, proving statistical consistency.
Bounds on treatment effect sensitivity in causal reasoning using Hölder's inequality.
problem Estimating treatment effects in presence of unobserved confounders.
method Using Hölder's inequality, derived bounds on confounding bias based on unmeasured confounding strength.
result Bounds are tight under specific conditions of independence between U and T/Y.
The paper shows how to audit fairness in decisions with hidden risk factors.
problem Estimating fairness in decisions influenced by hidden, unobservable risk factors.
method Derives unbiased estimates of risk using historical data and audits existing decision-making systems.
result One can compute meaningful bounds on treatment rates for high-risk individuals, even with hidden confounders.
This paper describes Simpson's paradox, and explains its serious implications for randomised control trials. In particular, we show that for any number of variables we can simulate the result of a controlled trial which uniformly points to one conclusion (such as 'drug is effective') for every possible combination of t…
Paper tackles unobserved confounding in human-AI collaborations.
problem Unobserved confounding undermines human-AI collaboration effectiveness.
method Combines sensitivity analysis from causal inference with AI-driven statistical modeling.
result Enhances robustness and reliability of collaborative outcomes.
New method estimates treatment effects over time with unobserved confounders.
problem Estimating treatment effects from observational data with unobserved confounders.
method Sequential Deconfounder using Gaussian process latent variable model.
result Unbiased estimates of individualized treatment responses over time.
Framework tests CATE homogeneity across trials and evaluates confounding.
problem Assessing treatment effect consistency across randomized and observational studies.
method Leverages multiple randomized trials to test CATE homogeneity and compares with observational data.
result Identifies potential confounding and effect heterogeneity in treatment effects.
New method removes hidden confounders for unbiased treatment effect estimation.
problem Bias in treatment effect estimation due to unobserved confounders.
method Proposes a new debiased estimation approach via SVD to handle heterogeneous confounding.
result Established rate of convergence for the estimator under different noise conditions.
New method identifies causal effects with categorical unobserved confounders.
problem Estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounders.
method Mixture learning and tensor decomposition for consistent estimation.
result Causal effects are identifiable with categorical unobserved confounders under suitable conditions.
Evaluating novel contextual bandit policies using logged data is crucial in applications where exploration is costly, such as medicine. But it usually relies on the assumption of no unobserved confounders, which is bound to fail in practice. We study the question of policy evaluation when we instead have proxies for th…
Proposes ρ-GNF for sensitivity analysis of unobserved confounding.
problem Sensitivity analysis of unobserved confounding in observational studies.
method Copulas and normalizing flows to estimate average causal effect (ACE) as a function of unobserved confounding strength.
result Develops ρcurve to provide bounds for ACE and identify confounding strength required to nullify ACE. New method scores DAGs by identifying unobserved confounding.
problem Unobserved confounding complicates causal discovery.
method Score-based causal discovery algorithm that accounts for unobserved confounding.
result Sparse linear Gaussian DAGs can be recovered from observed data.
New bounds assess policy evaluation under unobserved confounders, showing model-based methods are more effective.
problem Policy evaluation under unobserved confounders in uncertain causal environments.
method Developed worst-case bounds for sensitivity to unobserved confounders, demonstrating model-based methods are more effective.
result Model-based approaches with robust MDPs provide sharper lower bounds for policy evaluation.
Intact-VAE estimates treatment effects with latent confounders.
problem Estimating treatment effects under unobserved confounding.
method Intact-VAE, a VAE variant, models latent confounders to identify treatment effects.
result Intact-VAE is a consistent estimator of treatment effects under certain settings.
Combines IV and observational data to estimate CATEs with low compliance and unobserved confounding.
problem Estimating CATEs in personalized medicine and analytics with observational data and weak IVs.
method Two-stage framework: first learns biased CATEs from observational data, then corrects using IV data.
result Effective in estimating CATEs with low compliance and unobserved confounding.
Proposes a method to assess unobserved confounding effects in causal inference.
problem Assessing unobserved confounding in causal inference studies.
method Copula-based normalizing flows with sensitivity parameter ρ. result Estimates average causal effect (ACE) as a function of unobserved confounding strength.
The paper tackles robust domain generalization by accounting for unobserved confounders.
problem Learning robust, generalizable models from multiple datasets in the presence of unobserved confounders.
method Defines a new invariance property for causal solutions, connects it to distributionally robust optimization, and incorporates regularization to encourage partial equality of error derivatives.
result Demonstrates the empirical effectiveness of the approach on healthcare data from various modalities.
Estimates long-term effects from short-term experiments and observational data with unobserved confounders.
problem Estimating long-term causal effects from short-term experiments and long-term observational data with unobserved confounding.
method Combining regression residuals with short-term experimental outcomes to create an instrumental variable for estimating long-term causal effects.
result The estimator is unbiased and its variance is analytically studied.
Improved method for unbiased causal discovery in presence of unobserved confounding.
problem Unbiased data synthesis for causal discovery algorithms in the presence of unobserved confounding.
method Explicit block-hierarchical ancestral sampling to address limitations of implicit parameterization.
result Our approach fully covers the space of causal models, including those generated by implicit parameterization.
ContiVAE estimates individual dose-response curves from unobserved confounders using observational data.
problem Estimating causal effects of continuous treatments considering unobserved confounders.
method Variational auto-encoder with a Tilted Gaussian prior distribution modeling hidden confounders as latent variables.
result ContiVAE outperforms existing methods by up to 62% in predicting individual dose-response curves.
This work highlights problems with off-policy estimation in recommender systems due to unobserved confounders.
problem Evaluation of recommender systems under unobserved confounders.
method Policy-based estimators and characterisation of statistical bias due to confounding.
result Naive propensity estimation under confounding leads to severely biased metric estimates.
Proposes a method to improve treatment policies in data-scarce clinical settings.
problem Improving treatment policies in data-scarce clinical settings with unobserved confounding.
method Uses a causal mechanism to model the underlying generative process and augments counterfactual trajectories with source domain priors.
result Significantly improves treatment policy performance in a simulated sepsis treatment task.
Paper tackles confounded ANMs, estimating ACEs with minimal interventions.
problem Estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounders.
method Interventional distributions and randomized algorithm to reduce the number of required interventions.
result Poly-logarithmic number of interventions sufficient to infer causal effects in confounded ANMs.
Detect hidden confounding in observational data using multiple environments.
problem Detect hidden confounding in observational data.
method Theoretical framework and simulation studies to test for hidden confounding.
result The proposed procedure correctly predicts hidden confounding, especially when bias is large.
Estimates CATE under hidden confounding, accounting for bias and ignorance.
problem Learning CATE from high-dimensional data with unobserved confounders introduces bias and ignorance.
method Parametric interval estimator that accounts for hidden confounding and underrepresented samples.
result Estimator converges to tight bounds on CATE when there may be unobserved confounding.
Granger causality analysis, as one of the most popular time series causality methods, has been widely used in the economics, neuroscience. However, unobserved confounders is a fundamental problem in the observational studies, which is still not solved for the non-linear Granger causality. The application works often de…
Single proxy variable helps estimate causal effects from confounders.
problem Estimating causal effects from treatment to outcome when unobserved confounders are present.
method Assumes a single, potentially multi-dimensional proxy variable of the unobserved confounder and a known mechanism generating the proxy from the confounder. Proves causal effects are identifiable under completeness assumption.
result Causal effects are identifiable under SPICE assumption.
New design detects confounders from treatment intent in ICU data.
problem Unobserved confounding in observational ICU data.
method Querying human experts to identify unobserved confounders.
result Demonstrates feasibility of detecting confounders from EHRs.
Sharp policy value estimation for contextual bandits with unobserved confounders.
problem Estimating policy value under unobserved confounders with sensitivity analysis.
method Kernel method to approximate conditional moment constraints, leveraging f-divergence.
result Sharp lower bound of policy value, avoiding coarse relaxation of uncertainty set.
Develops a method to estimate policy values robustly in the presence of confounding variables.
problem Infinite-horizon reinforcement learning with unobserved confounding variables makes policy evaluation unidentifiable.
method Robust approach estimating sharp bounds on policy value using optimization over state-occupancy ratios and sensitivity model.
result Proves convergence to sharp bounds as more confounded data is collected.
Study tackles OPE in confounded settings, estimating policy value from proxies.
problem Difficulty in OPE due to unobserved confounders in infinite-horizon RL.
method Two-stage approach: estimating stationary distribution ratios and combining optimal balancing.
result Policy value can be identified from off-policy data with proxies and latent variable model.
Paper tackles distribution shifts in prediction models with unobserved confounding.
problem Distribution shifts in prediction models with unobserved confounding.
method Linear structural causal model, invariant covariate representations, data-driven representation learning method.
result Optimizes for a lower-dimensional linear subspace and a prediction model confined to that subspace, achieving nearly ideal gap between target and source risk.
Method learns causal effects from multiple interventions in presence of unobserved confounders.
problem Disentangling causal effects from sets of interventions in the presence of unobserved confounders.
method Non-linear structural causal models with additive, multivariate Gaussian noise; algorithm that learns causal model parameters by pooling data from different regimes and maximizing combined likelihood.
result Identification proofs demonstrate that causal effects of single interventions can be learned from sets of interventions, even with unobserved confounders.
We identify causal models with unobserved confounding using bijective generation mechanisms.
problem Identifying causal relationships with unobserved confounders.
method Establish counterfactual identifiability for BGMs and propose a learning method.
result Learned BGMs enable efficient counterfactual estimation.
The treatment effects of medications play a key role in guiding medical prescriptions. They are usually assessed with randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are expensive. Recently, large-scale electronic health records (EHRs) have become available, opening up new opportunities for more cost-effective assessments. …
New method tackles OOD robustness with a single additional variable.
problem Out-of-distribution generalization with unobserved confounders.
method Identifiability assumptions using a single additional variable.
result Superior empirical performance on benchmark tasks.
New method for robust policy evaluation in offline reinforcement learning with sequentially exogenous unobserved confounders.
problem Offline reinforcement learning in domains with unobserved confounders.
method Orthogonalized robust fitted-Q-iteration with closed-form solutions and bias-correction.
result Effective in simulations and real-world data, improving robustness and computational ease.
New model infers causal relationships from spatio-temporal data, even with unobserved confounders.
problem Challenges in inferring causal relationships from spatio-temporal data due to unobserved confounders.
method Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models (ST-HCMs) that extend hierarchical causal modeling to the spatio-temporal domain, using the Spatio-Temporal Collapse Theorem.
result Validated the effectiveness of ST-HCMs on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating robust causal inference in complex dynamic systems.
Proposes a new method for algorithmic recourse in confounded settings.
problem Provides actionable recommendations for individuals affected by automated decisions.
method Relaxes assumptions of no hidden confounding and additive noise, requiring only causal graph and confounding structure.
result Bounds the expected counterfactual effect of recourse actions, ensuring favourable outcomes in expectation.
Confounding biases recommender systems, even when data seems fully observed.
problem Unmeasured features influencing both treatment and outcome in recommender systems.
method Illustrations and simulation studies showing how common practices introduce confounding.
result Standard recommender system practices can introduce confounding, reducing performance.
We consider causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. We study the case where a proxy is available for the unobserved confounding in the form of a network connecting the units. For example, the link structure of a social network carries information about its members. We show how to effectively use the…