Local Covariate Selection for Average Causal Effect Estimation without Pretreatment and Causal Sufficiency Assumptions
We study the problem of selecting covariates for unbiased estimation of the total causal effect.Existing approaches typically rely on global causal structure learning over all variables, or on strong assumptions such as causal sufficiency - where observed variables share no latent confounders - or the pretreatment assumption, which limits covariates to those unaffected by the treatment or outcome. These requirements are often unrealistic in practice, and global learning becomes computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional settings.To address these challenges, we propose a novel local learning method for covariate selection in nonparametric causal effect estimation that avoids both the ...
| Authors | Zeyu Liu, Zheng Li, Feng Xie et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | stat.ML |
| Published | 20 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.