Skip to main content

Interpretable almost-matching-exactly with instrumental variables

Publication ,  Conference
Usaid Awan, M; Liu, Y; Morucci, M; Roy, S; Rudin, C; Volfovsky, A
Published in: 35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019
January 1, 2019

Uncertainty in the estimation of the causal effect in observational studies is often due to unmeasured confounding, i.e., the presence of unobserved covariates linking treatments and outcomes. Instrumental Variables (IV) are commonly used to reduce the effects of unmeasured confounding. Existing methods for IV estimation either require strong parametric assumptions, use arbitrary distance metrics, or do not scale well to large datasets. We propose a matching framework for IV in the presence of observed categorical confounders that addresses these weaknesses. Our method first matches units exactly, and then consecutively drops variables to approximately match the remaining units on as many variables as possible. We show that our algorithm constructs better matches than other existing methods on simulated datasets, and we produce interesting results in an application to political canvassing.

Duke Scholars

Published In

35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019

Publication Date

January 1, 2019
 

Citation

APA
Chicago
ICMJE
MLA
NLM
Usaid Awan, M., Liu, Y., Morucci, M., Roy, S., Rudin, C., & Volfovsky, A. (2019). Interpretable almost-matching-exactly with instrumental variables. In 35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019.
Usaid Awan, M., Y. Liu, M. Morucci, S. Roy, C. Rudin, and A. Volfovsky. “Interpretable almost-matching-exactly with instrumental variables.” In 35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019, 2019.
Usaid Awan M, Liu Y, Morucci M, Roy S, Rudin C, Volfovsky A. Interpretable almost-matching-exactly with instrumental variables. In: 35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019. 2019.
Usaid Awan, M., et al. “Interpretable almost-matching-exactly with instrumental variables.” 35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019, 2019.
Usaid Awan M, Liu Y, Morucci M, Roy S, Rudin C, Volfovsky A. Interpretable almost-matching-exactly with instrumental variables. 35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019. 2019.

Published In

35th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2019

Publication Date

January 1, 2019