arXiv AI

Generative Synthetic Data for Causal Inference: Pitfalls, Remedies, and Opportunities

arXiv:2604. 23904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Distributional Causal Mediation via Conditional Generative Modeling

arXiv:2605. 01765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mediation analysis has traditionally focused on outcome-level summary contrasts, such as mean effects, which may obscure substantial distributional changes induced by complex and nonlinear causal mechanisms.

By Jinlun Zhang, Haoneng Huang, Zishu Zhan, Chunquan Ou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Psych-ECA: A Reproducible Semi-Synthetic Benchmark for Synthetic Control Arms in Longitudinal Psychiatry

arXiv:2607. 27224v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: External and synthetic control arms (ECAs) are entering psychiatric drug development, but the field lacks a benchmark that evaluates the properties regulators care about: not only how accurately a method reconstructs untreated trajectories, but whether its uncertainty is calibrated, whether it is robust to the informative observation times common in mental-health records (sicker patients are seen more often), and what false-positive rate it induces in go/no-go trial decisions.

By Aakash Bhagat, Shashank Choudhary
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

CIDER-FM: Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes

CIDER-FM is a causal foundation model that combines finite observational data with surrogate-interventional datasets to predict target conditional interventional distributions more accurately than using observational data alone. It employs an intervention-aware representation and hierarchical three‑axis attention to integrate information across variables, samples, and experimental regimes. Experiments on synthetic graphs, simulated data, and real‑world Causal Chambers data show that incorporating experimental context improves CID prediction performance.

By Yuche Gao, Arik Reuter, Siyuan Guo, Anish Dhir, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Adrian Weller