Disentangling Causal Effects from Sets of Interventions in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some important areas, multiple interventions are concurrently applied. Disentangling the effects of single interventions from jointly applied interventions is a challenging task -- especially as simultaneously applied interventions can interact. This problem is made harder still by unobserved confounders, which influence both treatments and outcome. We address this challenge by aiming to learn the effect of a single-intervention from both observational data and sets of interventions. We prove that this is not generally possible, but provide identification proofs demonstrating that it can be achieved under non-linear continuous structural causal models with additive, multivariate Gaussian noise -- even when unobserved confounders are present. Importantly, we show how to incorporate observed covariates and learn heterogeneous treatment effects. Based on the identifiability proofs, we provide an algorithm that learns the causal model parameters by pooling data from different regimes and jointly maximizing the combined likelihood. The effectiveness of our method is empirically demonstrated on both synthetic and real-world data.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.
Builds on
15 of 33 references.
References · 15
- 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
- 2022Score matching enables causal discovery of nonlinear additive noise modelscited by 108
- 2019Learning Counterfactual Representations for Estimating Individual Dose-Response Curvescited by 90
- 2021Nested Counterfactual Identification from Arbitrary Surrogate Experimentscited by 38
- 2019The Sensitivity of Counterfactual Fairness to Unmeasured Confoundingcited by 35
- 2017Estimation of causal effects with multiple treatments: a review and new ideascited by 29
- 2014Estimating the effect of joint interventions from observational data in sparse high-dimensional settingscited by 20
- 2021Estimating Categorical Counterfactuals via Deep Twin Networkscited by 18
- 2021NCoRE: Neural Counterfactual Representation Learning for Combinations of Treatmentscited by 14
- 2019Integrating overlapping datasets using bivariate causal discoverycited by 12
- 2019Leveraging directed causal discovery to detect latent common causescited by 9
- 2020Learning Joint Nonlinear Effects from Single-variable Interventions in the Presence of Hidden Confounderscited by 7
3 more
- 2015Causal inference via algebraic geometry: feasibility tests for functional causal structures with two binary observed variablescited by 6
- 2019MultiVerse: Causal Reasoning using Importance Sampling in Probabilistic Programmingcited by 4
- 2021Multiply Robust Causal Mediation Analysis with Continuous Treatmentscited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 5; 2025: 3.
10 papers.
- 2023Estimating long-term causal effects from short-term experiments and long-term observational data with unobserved confoundingcited by 11
- 2024Contrastive representations of high-dimensional, structured treatmentscited by 7
- 2023Non-parametric identifiability and sensitivity analysis of synthetic control modelscited by 5
- 2024Spillover Detection for Donor Selection in Synthetic Control Modelscited by 4
- 2025The Hardness of Validating Observational Studies with Experimental Datacited by 4
- 2024Causal Inference with Complex Treatments: A Surveycited by 3
- 2024Identification of Average Causal Effects in Confounded Additive Noise Modelscited by 2
- 2024Estimating Joint Interventional Distributions from Marginal Interventional Datacited by 2
- 2025Local Interference: Removing Interference Bias in Semi-Parametric Causal Modelscited by 1
- 2025Learning Joint Interventional Effects from Single-Variable Interventions in Additive Modelscited by 0
- 2025Learning Joint Interventional Effects from Single-Variable Interventions in Additive Models5 Jun 2025
- 2025Local Interference: Removing Interference Bias in Semi-Parametric Causal Models24 Mar 2025
- 2025The Hardness of Validating Observational Studies with Experimental Data19 Mar 2025
- 2024Contrastive representations of high-dimensional, structured treatments28 Nov 2024
- 2024Estimating Joint Interventional Distributions from Marginal Interventional Data3 Sep 2024
- 2024Causal Inference with Complex Treatments: A Survey19 Jul 2024
- 2024Identification of Average Causal Effects in Confounded Additive Noise Models13 Jul 2024
- 2024Spillover Detection for Donor Selection in Synthetic Control Models17 Jun 2024
- 2023Estimating long-term causal effects from short-term experiments and long-term observational data with unobserved confounding21 Feb 2023
- 2023Non-parametric identifiability and sensitivity analysis of synthetic control models18 Jan 2023