arXiv Statistics ML

Causal Inference in Possibly Nonlinear Factor Models

The paper introduces a causal inference method for treatment effect models where confounders are measured noisily. It leverages many noisy proxies linked to latent confounders through an unknown, possibly nonlinear factor structure, using a local principal subspace approximation that combines K‑nearest‑neighbor matching and principal component analysis. The authors construct doubly‑robust estimators for various causal parameters, establish their large‑sample properties, and provide uniformly consistent estimators of the conditional average treatment effect, illustrated with an empirical study on political connections and stock returns and a Monte Carlo experiment.

arXiv Statistics ML
4d ago

Identifying Causal Effects Using a Single Proxy Variable

The paper tackles the problem of estimating causal effects when an unobserved confounder is present. It assumes a single, possibly multi‑dimensional proxy variable for the confounder and knowledge of the mechanism that generates this proxy. Under the Single Proxy Identifiability of Causal Effects (SPICE) assumption, the authors prove that the error mechanism is complete and causal effects are identifiable, extending prior proxy‑based results to continuous, multi‑dimensional settings and more flexible functional forms. They also introduce SPICE‑Net, a neural‑network‑based framework for estimating causal effects applicable to both discrete and continuous treatments.

By Silvan Vollmer, Niklas Pfister, Sebastian Weichwald
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Causal Inference with Unobserved Confounding: A Mixture Learning Perspective

The paper introduces a mixture‑learning framework for causal inference with unobserved confounding, treating latent confounders as sources of heterogeneity that create mixture structures in observed data. By assuming suitable structural and identifiability conditions, it shows that recovering the mixing distribution and component mechanisms allows estimation of interventional distributions and causal estimands. The authors illustrate the approach with Bernoulli mixture examples, extend it to high‑dimensional exponential‑family mixtures with dependent outcomes, and relate it to panel‑data settings, latent factor models, and synthetic interventions.

By Mansi Sood, Devavrat Shah
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Foundation Models for Partial Causal Identification

The paper introduces causal foundation models that can bound the effects of interventions and counterfactuals using only observational data. It defines a canonical prior with full support over structural causal models with discrete observables, enabling the translation of counterfactual bounding into learning distributions over functions that map data and structural assumptions to causal queries. This approach extends causal foundational modelling to partially-identifiable causal effects, where unobserved confounding leads to multiple compatible values for the effect.

By Alexis Bellot, Anish Dhir
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 21

Exponential Family Synthetic Controls

We develop exponential family synthetic controls (EFSC), a distributional version of synthetic controls for a panel of datasets. Each cell of the panel corresponds to a dataset drawn from an exponenti...

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Spatial Deconfounder: Interference-Aware Deconfounding for Spatial Causal Inference

arXiv:2510. 08762v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal inference in spatial domains faces two intertwined challenges: (1) unmeasured spatial factors, such as weather, air pollution, or mobility, that confound treatment and outcome, and (2) interference from nearby treatments that violate standard no-interference assumptions.

By Ayush Khot, Miruna Oprescu, Maresa Schr\"oder, Ai Kagawa, Xihaier Luo