# Local Covariate Selection for Average Causal Effect Estimation without Pretreatment and Causal Sufficiency Assumptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21548/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Local Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16225/) (2024)
- [Local search for efficient causal effect estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10014/) (2020)
- [Local Discovery by Partitioning: Polynomial-Time Causal Discovery Around Exposure-Outcome Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17816/) (2023)
- [Local Causal Discovery for Structural Evidence of Direct Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14848/) (2024)
- [On the Representation of Pairwise Causal Background Knowledge and Its Applications in Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05067/) (2022)
- [Local Learning for Covariate Selection in Nonparametric Causal Effect Estimation with Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16315/) (2024)
- [Causal query in observational data with hidden variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10269/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the problem of selecting covariates for unbiased estimation of the total causal effect.Existing approaches typically rely on global causal structure learning over all variables, or on strong assumptions such as causal sufficiency - where observed variables share no latent confounders - or the pretreatment assumption, which limits covariates to those unaffected by the treatment or outcome. These requirements are often unrealistic in practice, and global learning becomes computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional settings.To address these challenges, we propose a novel local learning method for covariate selection in nonparametric causal effect estimation that avoids both the pretreatment and causal sufficiency assumptions. We first characterize a local boundary that contains at least one valid adjustment set whenever one exists for identifying the causal effect, and then develop local identification procedures to efficiently search within this boundary.We prove that the proposed method is sound and complete. Experiments on multiple synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets show that our approach achieves accurate causal effect estimation while substantially improving computational efficiency.