The Hardness of Validating Observational Studies with Experimental Data

Abstract

Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data with experimental data, which, when available, is typically on a smaller scale due to the time and cost involved in running a randomised controlled trial. In this work, we prove a theorem that places fundamental limits on this ``best of both worlds'' approach. Using the framework of impossible inference, we show that although it is possible to use experimental data to \emph{falsify} causal effect estimates from observational data, in general it is not possible to \emph{validate} such estimates. Our theorem proves that while experimental data can be used to detect bias in observational studies, without additional assumptions on the smoothness of the correction function, it can not be used to remove it. We provide a practical example of such an assumption, developing a novel Gaussian Process based approach to construct intervals which contain the true treatment effect with high probability, both inside and outside of the support of the experimental data. We demonstrate our methodology on both simulated and semi-synthetic datasets and make the \href{https://github.com/Jakefawkes/Obs_and_exp_data}{code available}.