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Summary of Detecting and Measuring Confounding Using Causal Mechanism Shifts, by Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy and Vineeth N Balasubramanian


Detecting and Measuring Confounding Using Causal Mechanism Shifts

by Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy, Vineeth N Balasubramanian

First submitted to arxiv on: 26 Sep 2024

Categories

  • Main: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
  • Secondary: None

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GrooveSquid.com Paper Summaries

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Summary difficulty Written by Summary
High Paper authors High Difficulty Summary
Read the original abstract here
Medium GrooveSquid.com (original content) Medium Difficulty Summary
Medium Difficulty summary: Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is crucial in causal inference. Existing methods often assume causal sufficiency, ignoring unobserved confounding variables. This assumption is unrealistic and empirically untestable. Furthermore, existing methods rely on strong parametric assumptions about the underlying causal generative process to ensure identifiability of confounding variables. In contrast, this paper proposes a comprehensive approach for detecting and measuring confounding by relaxing these assumptions and leveraging advancements in causal discovery and confounding analysis with non-i.i.d. data. The proposed methodology achieves three objectives: (i) detecting and measuring confounding among a set of variables, (ii) separating observed and unobserved confounding effects, and (iii) understanding the relative strengths of confounding bias between different sets of variables. The paper presents useful properties of a confounding measure and introduces measures that satisfy these properties. Empirical results support the theoretical analysis.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
Low Difficulty summary: Imagine trying to figure out what’s really causing something to happen, but there are hidden factors affecting the outcome. This is called “confounding” in science. Right now, scientists have trouble detecting and measuring these confounding effects. They often assume that everything important is accounted for, but this isn’t always true. The researchers behind this study want to improve how we detect and measure confounding effects. They’re proposing a new way of doing things that doesn’t make strong assumptions about what’s causing the outcome. Instead, they’re using recent advancements in science to help us understand the hidden factors that might be affecting our results.

Keywords

» Artificial intelligence  » Inference