Recovering from Selection Bias in Causal and Statistical Inference

نویسندگان

  • Elias Bareinboim
  • Jin Tian
  • Judea Pearl
چکیده

Selection bias is caused by preferential exclusion of units from the samples and represents a major obstacle to valid causal and statistical inferences; it cannot be removed by randomized experiments and can rarely be detected in either experimental or observational studies. In this paper, we provide complete graphical and algorithmic conditions for recovering conditional probabilities from selection biased data. We also provide graphical conditions for recoverability when unbiased data is available over a subset of the variables. Finally, we provide a graphical condition that generalizes the backdoor criterion and serves to recover causal effects when the data is collected under preferential selection.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Controlling Selection Bias in Causal Inference

Selection bias, caused by preferential exclusion of samples from the data, is a major obstacle to valid causal and statistical inferences; it cannot be removed by randomized experiments and can hardly be detected in either experimental or observational studies. This paper highlights several graphical and algebraic methods capable of mitigating and sometimes eliminating this bias. These nonparam...

متن کامل

Causal Methods for Observational Data

Comparative effectiveness research often uses non-experimental observational data (like hospital discharge records or nationally representative surveys) to draw causal inference about the effectiveness of interventions for health. These ex post inferences require the careful use of specialized statistical methods in order to account for issues like selection bias and unmeasured heterogeneity. T...

متن کامل

Introduction to the Virtual Issue: Past and Future Research Agenda on Causal Inference

If you ask political scientists whether a major goal of their empirical research is to test causal relationships, I suspect that most of them answer “yes.” In contrast, many statisticians would say that their methods may improve predictions but have little to do with causal inference. As a result, even as an increasing number of social scientists use statistical methods to infer causal effects ...

متن کامل

Causal Inference in the Presence of Latent Variables and Selection Bias

We show that there is a general, informative and reliable procedure for discovering causal relations when, for all the investigator knows, both latent variables and selection bias may be at work. Given information about con­ ditional independence and dependence rela­ tions between measured variables, even when latent variables and selection bias may be present, there are sufficient conditions f...

متن کامل

Graphical Causal Models

This chapter discusses the use of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) for causal inference in the observational social sciences. It focuses on DAGs’ main uses, discusses central principles, and gives applied examples. DAGs are visual representations of qualitative causal assumptions: They encode researchers’ beliefs about how the world works. Straightforward rules map these causal assumptions onto t...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2014