Many Experiments, Few Repetitions, Unpaired Data, and Sparse Effects: Is Causal Inference Possible?

Felix Schur; Niklas Pfister; Peng Ding; Sach Mukherjee; Jonas Peters

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arXiv · 2601.15254

Many Experiments, Few Repetitions, Unpaired Data, and Sparse Effects: Is Causal Inference Possible?

Felix Schur·Niklas Pfister·Peng Ding·Sach Mukherjee·Jonas Peters

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Abstract

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe them jointly; we either observe $X$ or $Y$. Under appropriate regularity conditions, the problem can be cast as an instrumental variable (IV) regression with the environment acting as a (possibly high-dimensional) instrument. When there are many environments but only a few observations per environment, standard two-sample IV estimators fail to be consistent. We propose a GMM-type estimator based on cross-fold sample splitting of the instrument-covariate sample and prove that it is consistent as the number of environments grows but the sample size per environment remains constant. We further extend the method to sparse causal effects via $\ell_1$-regularized estimation and post-selection refitting.

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Felix Schur, Niklas Pfister, Peng Ding, Sach Mukherjee, Jonas Peters. 2026-01-21. Many Experiments, Few Repetitions, Unpaired Data, and Sparse Effects: Is Causal Inference Possible?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15254

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