Marginal Causal Effect Estimation with Continuous Instrumental Variables
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-binary instrumental variables, especially continuous ones, are common in practice. A binary recoding induces a Wald ratio but may discard useful variation and reduce efficiency. Although fully nonparametric approaches can in principle use the entire instrument, they often require high-dimensional nuisance estimation which can be unstable with rich covariates. We address this problem by developing a generalized Wald estimand for binary treatments that uses the full variation in a non-binary instrument. Under standard instrumental-variable assumptions and a homogeneity condition, the estimand yields a common identification formula for categorical and continuous instruments. We further develop its semiparametric efficiency theory and construct a locally efficient debiased estimator using risk-minimization reparameterizations and double cross-fitting to accommodate flexible machine learning while improving numerical stability. The central technical challenge is that the many Wald ratios generated by a non-binary instrument must agree, thereby imposing overidentifying restrictions on the observed-data law. In this setting, characterizing the tangent space is nonstandard: it requires a second-order parametric submodel, a construction that, to our knowledge, has not been standard in semiparametric efficiency theory. Simulations show stable performance across sample sizes and greater efficiency than estimators based on dichotomized instruments. In an application to the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre lung cancer cohort, associational analyses link excess body weight to lower two-year mortality, a seemingly protective pattern often called the obesity paradox. The proposed instrumental-variable analysis instead suggests increased mortality, pointing to residual confounding behind this paradox.
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 | 0.012 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".