Causal simulation experiments: Lessons from bias amplification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent theoretical work in causal inference has explored an important class of variables which, when conditioned on, may further amplify existing unmeasured confounding bias (bias amplification). Despite this theoretical work, existing simulations of bias amplification in clinical settings have suggested bias amplification may not be as important in many practical cases as suggested in the theoretical literature. We resolve this tension by using tools from the semi-parametric regression literature leading to a general characterization in terms of the geometry of OLS estimators which allows us to extend current results to a larger class of DAGs, functional forms, and distributional assumptions. We further use these results to understand the limitations of current simulation approaches and to propose a new framework for performing causal simulation experiments to compare estimators. We then evaluate the challenges and benefits of extending this simulation approach to the context of a real clinical data set with a binary treatment, laying the groundwork for a principled approach to sensitivity analysis for bias amplification in the presence of unmeasured confounding.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.210 | 0.641 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".