Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34441068›Full record

ArticleEntropy (Basel, Switzerland)2021

The Role of Instrumental Variables in Causal Inference Based on Independence of Cause and Mechanism.

Nataliya Sokolovska, Pierre-Henri Wuillemin

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Nataliya SokolovskaNutriOmics, UMR S 1269, INSERM, Sorbonne University, 91, Boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75013 Paris, France.ORCID 0000-0001-8841-1725
Pierre-Henri WuilleminLaboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, Sorbonne University, 4 Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France.ORCID 0000-0003-3691-4886

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Causal inference methods based on conditional independence construct Markov equivalent graphs and cannot be applied to bivariate cases. The approaches based on independence of cause and mechanism state, on the contrary, that causal discovery can be inferred for two observations. In our contribution, we pose a challenge to reconcile these two research directions. We study the role of latent variables such as latent instrumental variables and hidden common causes in the causal graphical structures. We show that methods based on the independence of cause and mechanism indirectly contain traces of the existence of the hidden instrumental variables. We derive a novel algorithm to infer causal relationships between two variables, and we validate the proposed method on simulated data and on a benchmark of cause-effect pairs. We illustrate by our experiments that the proposed approach is simple and extremely competitive in terms of empirical accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Indexed as

common hidden causegraphical modelsprobabilistic models

Identifiers

PMID34441068
PMCPMC8393789

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.