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Spotlight
Removing Hidden Confounding by Experimental Grounding
Nathan Kallus · Aahlad Puli · Uri Shalit

Thu Dec 06 07:40 AM -- 07:45 AM (PST) @ Room 220 E
in Thu Track 2 -- Session 1 »

Observational data is increasingly used as a means for making individual-level causal predictions and intervention recommendations. The foremost challenge of causal inference from observational data is hidden confounding, whose presence cannot be tested in data and can invalidate any causal conclusion. Experimental data does not suffer from confounding but is usually limited in both scope and scale. We introduce a novel method of using limited experimental data to correct the hidden confounding in causal effect models trained on larger observational data, even if the observational data does not fully overlap with the experimental data. Our method makes strictly weaker assumptions than existing approaches, and we prove conditions under which it yields a consistent estimator. We demonstrate our method's efficacy using real-world data from a large educational experiment.

Author Information

Nathan Kallus (Cornell University)
Aahlad Puli (NYU)
Uri Shalit (Technion)

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