arXiv subjects

Daniel Malinsky

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Malinsky.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Bridging Predictions and Interventions: An Integrated Framework for Automated Decision-Systems

Automated decision systems (ADS) leverage predictions about individual future outcomes to inform consequential decision-making in organizational settings. Across various settings - including criminal pretrial release, clinical triage, student support, and more - it is often assumed that improved predictive accuracy is the priority consideration in determining better downstream outcomes upon the deployment of ADS. In practice, real-world case studies reveal that this is far from the case: introducing individual predictions into decision-making modifies organizational workflows, assessment, and decision-making processes in ways that require a complete re-consideration of our approach to the design, evaluation, and deployment of ADS. As a result, this Perspective develops an integrated framework for studying ADS in social systems, shifting current priorities from a purely prediction-based paradigm towards an intervention-oriented view that accounts for real-world conditions. Our aim is to improve our understanding of ADS and more meaningfully anticipate its downstream societal and organizational consequences.

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arXiv2026

Exploiting independence constraints for efficient estimation of bounds on causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding

Causal graphs may inform covariate adjustment for estimating causal effects and improve estimation efficiency by exploiting the graphical structure. In many applications, however, the target causal parameter may not be point-identified due to the presence of unmeasured confounding. Sensitivity analysis methods address this challenge by characterizing bounds on the causal parameter under varying assumptions about the magnitude or form of unmeasured confounding. We focus on semiparametric efficient estimation of causal effects in non-identifiable settings, assuming a known (or hypothesized) causal graph. We propose an influence function projection approach that exploits the conditional independence constraints implied by the graph to improve the efficiency of semiparametric estimators of upper and lower bounds on the average causal effect under a given sensitivity analysis model. Our approach applies across multiple sensitivity analysis frameworks and causal estimands, thereby connecting knowledge of graphical structure with the sensitivity analysis literature. We illustrate our approach through simulations and real data examples thought to be affected by unmeasured confounding, including the effect of labor training program on post-intervention earnings, and the effect of low ejection fraction on heart failure death.

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arXiv2025

Mediation Analysis in the Presence of Sample Selection Bias with an Application to Disparities in Liver Transplantation Listing

The study of disparities in the liver transplantation process may focus on quantifying causal effects, particularly the average, direct, or indirect effects of various social determinants of health on being listed as a candidate for transplant. Selection bias arises when the data sample does not represent the target population, defined here as all individuals referred to the transplant clinic. Listing decisions are made for the subset of patients who complete the evaluation process, who may differ systematically from the referred population. There is evidence that selection is associated with patient characteristics that also impact outcomes. Using data only from the selected population may yield biased causal effect estimates. However, incorporating data from the referred population allows for analytic correction. This correction leverages hypothesized causal relationships among selection, the outcome (getting listed), exposures, and mediators. Using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), we establish graphical conditions under which a reweighted mediation formula identifies effect of interest - direct, indirect, and path-specific effects - in the presence of sample selection. In a clinical case study, we investigate mediated and direct effects of a patient's socioeconomic position on being listed for transplant, allowing selection to depend on race, gender, age, and other social determinants.

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arXiv2025

Estimating Effects of Longitudinal Modified Treatment Policies (LMTPs) on Rates of Change in Health Outcomes

Longitudinal data often contains outcomes measured at multiple visits, and scientific interest may lie in quantifying the effect of an intervention on an outcome's rate of change. For example, one may wish to study the progression (or trajectory) of a disease over time under different hypothetical interventions. We extend the longitudinal modified treatment policy (LMTP) methodology to estimate effects of complex, exposure-dependent interventions on rates of change in an outcome over time. We exploit the theoretical properties of a nonparametric efficient influence function (EIF)-based estimator to introduce a novel inference framework that can be used to construct simultaneous confidence intervals for a variety of causal effects of interest and to formally test relevant global and local hypotheses about rates of change. We demonstrate the utility of our framework in investigating whether a longitudinal shift intervention affects an outcome's counterfactual trajectory, as compared with no intervention. We present results from a simulation study to illustrate the performance of our inference framework in a longitudinal setting with time-varying confounding and a continuous exposure. We also apply our inference framework to the Columbia Brain Health DataBank (CBDB) to examine the effect of shifting blood pressure on the progression of dementia.

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arXiv2025

Bridging Prediction and Intervention Problems in Social Systems

Many automated decision systems (ADS) are designed to solve prediction problems -- where the goal is to learn patterns from a sample of the population and apply them to individuals from the same population. In reality, these prediction systems operationalize holistic policy interventions in deployment. Once deployed, ADS can shape impacted population outcomes through an effective policy change in how decision-makers operate, while also being defined by past and present interactions between stakeholders and the limitations of existing organizational, as well as societal, infrastructure and context. In this work, we consider the ways in which we must shift from a prediction-focused paradigm to an intervention-oriented paradigm when considering the impact of ADS within social systems. We argue this requires a new default problem setup for ADS beyond prediction, to instead consider predictions as decision support, final decisions, and outcomes. We highlight how this perspective unifies modern statistical frameworks and other tools to study the design, implementation, and evaluation of ADS systems, and point to the research directions necessary to operationalize this paradigm shift. Using these tools, we characterize the limitations of focusing on isolated prediction tasks, and lay the foundation for a more intervention-oriented approach to developing and deploying ADS.

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arXiv2024

Quantile Graph Discovery through QuACC: Quantile Association via Conditional Concordance

Graphical structure learning is an effective way to assess and visualize cross-biomarker dependencies in biomedical settings. Standard approaches to estimating graphs rely on conditional independence tests that may not be sensitive to associations that manifest at the tails of joint distributions, i.e., they may miss connections among variables that exhibit associations mainly at lower or upper quantiles. In this work, we propose a novel measure of quantile-specific conditional association called QuACC: Quantile Association via Conditional Concordance. For a pair of variables and a conditioning set, QuACC quantifies agreement between the residuals from two quantile regression models, which may be linear or more complex, e.g., quantile forests. Using this measure as the basis for a test of null (quantile) association, we introduce a new class of quantile-specific graphical models. Through simulation we show our method is powerful for detecting dependencies under dependencies that manifest at the tails of distributions. We apply our method to biobank data from All of Us and identify quantile-specific patterns of conditional association in a multivariate setting.

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arXiv2024

Post-selection inference for causal effects after causal discovery

Algorithms for constraint-based causal discovery select graphical causal models among a space of possible candidates (e.g., all directed acyclic graphs) by executing a sequence of conditional independence tests. These may be used to inform the estimation of causal effects (e.g., average treatment effects) when there is uncertainty about which covariates ought to be adjusted for, or which variables act as confounders versus mediators. However, naively using the data twice, for model selection and estimation, would lead to invalid confidence intervals. Moreover, if the selected graph is incorrect, the inferential claims may apply to a selected functional that is distinct from the actual causal effect. We propose an approach to post-selection inference that is based on a resampling and screening procedure, which essentially performs causal discovery multiple times with randomly varying intermediate test statistics. Then, an estimate of the target causal effect and corresponding confidence sets are constructed from a union of individual graph-based estimates and intervals. We show that this construction has asymptotically correct coverage for the true causal effect parameter. Importantly, the guarantee holds for a fixed population-level effect, not a data-dependent or selection-dependent quantity. Most of our exposition focuses on the PC-algorithm for learning directed acyclic graphs and the multivariate Gaussian case for simplicity, but the approach is general and modular, so it may be used with other conditional independence based discovery algorithms and distributional families.

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arXiv2024

A cautious approach to constraint-based causal model selection

We study the data-driven selection of causal graphical models using constraint-based algorithms, which determine the existence or non-existence of edges (causal connections) in a graph based on testing a series of conditional independence hypotheses. In settings where the ultimate scientific goal is to use the selected graph to inform estimation of some causal effect of interest (e.g., by selecting a valid and sufficient set of adjustment variables), we argue that a "cautious" approach to graph selection should control the probability of falsely removing edges and prefer dense, rather than sparse, graphs. We propose a simple inversion of the usual conditional independence testing procedure: to remove an edge, test the null hypothesis of conditional association greater than some user-specified threshold, rather than the null of independence. This equivalence testing formulation to testing independence constraints leads to a procedure with desriable statistical properties and behaviors that better match the inferential goals of certain scientific studies, for example observational epidemiological studies that aim to estimate causal effects in the face of causal model uncertainty. We illustrate our approach on a data example from environmental epidemiology.

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arXiv2024

Mediated probabilities of causation

We propose a set of causal estimands that we call the "mediated probabilities of causation." These estimands quantify the probabilities that an observed negative outcome was induced via a mediating pathway versus a direct pathway in a stylized setting involving a binary exposure or intervention, a single binary mediator, and a binary outcome. We outline a set of conditions sufficient to identify these effects given observed data, and propose a doubly-robust projection based estimation strategy that allows for the use of flexible non-parametric and machine learning methods for estimation. We argue that these effects may be more relevant than the probability of causation, particularly in settings where we observe both some negative outcome and negative mediating event, and we wish to distinguish between settings where the outcome was induced via the exposure inducing the mediator versus the exposure inducing the outcome directly. We motivate these estimands by discussing applications to legal and medical questions of causal attribution.

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arXiv2023

Causal Inference With Outcome-Dependent Missingness And Self-Censoring

We consider missingness in the context of causal inference when the outcome of interest may be missing. If the outcome directly affects its own missingness status, i.e., it is "self-censoring", this may lead to severely biased causal effect estimates. Miao et al. [2015] proposed the shadow variable method to correct for bias due to self-censoring; however, verifying the required model assumptions can be difficult. Here, we propose a test based on a randomized incentive variable offered to encourage reporting of the outcome that can be used to verify identification assumptions that are sufficient to correct for both self-censoring and confounding bias. Concretely, the test confirms whether a given set of pre-treatment covariates is sufficient to block all backdoor paths between the treatment and outcome as well as all paths between the treatment and missingness indicator after conditioning on the outcome. We show that under these conditions, the causal effect is identified by using the treatment as a shadow variable, and it leads to an intuitive inverse probability weighting estimator that uses a product of the treatment and response weights. We evaluate the efficacy of our test and downstream estimator via simulations.

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arXiv2020

Differentiable Causal Discovery Under Unmeasured Confounding

The data drawn from biological, economic, and social systems are often confounded due to the presence of unmeasured variables. Prior work in causal discovery has focused on discrete search procedures for selecting acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs), specifically ancestral ADMGs, that encode ordinary conditional independence constraints among the observed variables of the system. However, confounded systems also exhibit more general equality restrictions that cannot be represented via these graphs, placing a limit on the kinds of structures that can be learned using ancestral ADMGs. In this work, we derive differentiable algebraic constraints that fully characterize the space of ancestral ADMGs, as well as more general classes of ADMGs, arid ADMGs and bow-free ADMGs, that capture all equality restrictions on the observed variables. We use these constraints to cast causal discovery as a continuous optimization problem and design differentiable procedures to find the best fitting ADMG when the data comes from a confounded linear system of equations with correlated errors. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through simulations and application to a protein expression dataset. Code implementing our methods is open-source and publicly available at https://gitlab.com/rbhatta8/dcd and will be incorporated into the Ananke package.

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arXiv2020

Explaining the Behavior of Black-Box Prediction Algorithms with Causal Learning

Causal approaches to post-hoc explainability for black-box prediction models (e.g., deep neural networks trained on image pixel data) have become increasingly popular. However, existing approaches have two important shortcomings: (i) the "explanatory units" are micro-level inputs into the relevant prediction model, e.g., image pixels, rather than interpretable macro-level features that are more useful for understanding how to possibly change the algorithm's behavior, and (ii) existing approaches assume there exists no unmeasured confounding between features and target model predictions, which fails to hold when the explanatory units are macro-level variables. Our focus is on the important setting where the analyst has no access to the inner workings of the target prediction algorithm, rather only the ability to query the output of the model in response to a particular input. To provide causal explanations in such a setting, we propose to learn causal graphical representations that allow for arbitrary unmeasured confounding among features. We demonstrate the resulting graph can differentiate between interpretable features that causally influence model predictions versus those that are merely associated with model predictions due to confounding. Our approach is motivated by a counterfactual theory of causal explanation wherein good explanations point to factors that are "difference-makers" in an interventionist sense.

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arXiv2019

Optimal Training of Fair Predictive Models

Recently there has been sustained interest in modifying prediction algorithms to satisfy fairness constraints. These constraints are typically complex nonlinear functionals of the observed data distribution. Focusing on the path-specific causal constraints proposed by Nabi and Shpitser (2018), we introduce new theoretical results and optimization techniques to make model training easier and more accurate. Specifically, we show how to reparameterize the observed data likelihood such that fairness constraints correspond directly to parameters that appear in the likelihood, transforming a complex constrained optimization objective into a simple optimization problem with box constraints. We also exploit methods from empirical likelihood theory in statistics to improve predictive performance by constraining baseline covariates, without requiring parametric models. We combine the merits of both proposals to optimize a hybrid reparameterized likelihood. The techniques presented here should be applicable more broadly to fair prediction proposals that impose constraints on predictive models.

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arXiv2019

Semiparametric Inference for Non-monotone Missing-Not-at-Random Data: the No Self-Censoring Model

We study the identification and estimation of statistical functionals of multivariate data missing non-monotonically and not-at-random, taking a semiparametric approach. Specifically, we assume that the missingness mechanism satisfies what has been previously called "no self-censoring" or "itemwise conditionally independent nonresponse," which roughly corresponds to the assumption that no partially-observed variable directly determines its own missingness status. We show that this assumption, combined with an odds ratio parameterization of the joint density, enables identification of functionals of interest, and we establish the semiparametric efficiency bound for the nonparametric model satisfying this assumption. We propose a practical augmented inverse probability weighted estimator, and in the setting with a (possibly high-dimensional) always-observed subset of covariates, our proposed estimator enjoys a certain double-robustness property. We explore the performance of our estimator with simulation experiments and on a previously-studied data set of HIV-positive mothers in Botswana.

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arXiv2019

Causal Inference Under Interference And Network Uncertainty

Classical causal and statistical inference methods typically assume the observed data consists of independent realizations. However, in many applications this assumption is inappropriate due to a network of dependences between units in the data. Methods for estimating causal effects have been developed in the setting where the structure of dependence between units is known exactly, but in practice there is often substantial uncertainty about the precise network structure. This is true, for example, in trial data drawn from vulnerable communities where social ties are difficult to query directly. In this paper we combine techniques from the structure learning and interference literatures in causal inference, proposing a general method for estimating causal effects under data dependence when the structure of this dependence is not known a priori. We demonstrate the utility of our method on synthetic datasets which exhibit network dependence.

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arXiv2019

A Potential Outcomes Calculus for Identifying Conditional Path-Specific Effects

The do-calculus is a well-known deductive system for deriving connections between interventional and observed distributions, and has been proven complete for a number of important identifiability problems in causal inference. Nevertheless, as it is currently defined, the do-calculus is inapplicable to causal problems that involve complex nested counterfactuals which cannot be expressed in terms of the "do" operator. Such problems include analyses of path-specific effects and dynamic treatment regimes. In this paper we present the potential outcome calculus (po-calculus), a natural generalization of do-calculus for arbitrary potential outcomes. We thereby provide a bridge between identification approaches which have their origins in artificial intelligence and statistics, respectively. We use po-calculus to give a complete identification algorithm for conditional path-specific effects with applications to problems in mediation analysis and algorithmic fairness.

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arXiv2018

Learning Optimal Fair Policies

Systematic discriminatory biases present in our society influence the way data is collected and stored, the way variables are defined, and the way scientific findings are put into practice as policy. Automated decision procedures and learning algorithms applied to such data may serve to perpetuate existing injustice or unfairness in our society. In this paper, we consider how to make optimal but fair decisions, which "break the cycle of injustice" by correcting for the unfair dependence of both decisions and outcomes on sensitive features (e.g., variables that correspond to gender, race, disability, or other protected attributes). We use methods from causal inference and constrained optimization to learn optimal policies in a way that addresses multiple potential biases which afflict data analysis in sensitive contexts, extending the approach of (Nabi and Shpitser 2018). Our proposal comes equipped with the theoretical guarantee that the chosen fair policy will induce a joint distribution for new instances that satisfies given fairness constraints. We illustrate our approach with both synthetic data and real criminal justice data.

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arXiv2016

algcomparison: Comparing the Performance of Graphical Structure Learning Algorithms with TETRAD

In this report we describe a tool for comparing the performance of graphical causal structure learning algorithms implemented in the TETRAD freeware suite of causal analysis methods. Currently the tool is available as package in the TETRAD source code (written in Java). Simulations can be done varying the number of runs, sample sizes, and data modalities. Performance on this simulated data can then be compared for a number of algorithms, with parameters varied and with performance statistics as selected, producing a publishable report. The package presented here may also be used to compare structure learning methods across platforms and programming languages, i.e., to compare algorithms implemented in TETRAD with those implemented in MATLAB, Python, or R.

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