EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Individual causation with biased data

Monica Musio () and Philip Dawid ()
Additional contact information
Monica Musio: Università degli studi di Cagliari
Philip Dawid: University of Cambridge

METRON, 2025, vol. 83, issue 1, No 8, 150 pages

Abstract: Abstract The field of causal statistical inference subsumes two quite distinct general activities: inference about “Effects of Causes" (EoC), and inference about “Causes of Effects" (CoE). While related, these are very different enterprises. Indeed, even if we have full knowledge of the probabilities of outcomes under different exposures, that doesn’t directly address the question of whether a specific exposure caused a particular outcome in an individual case. For this we require the “probability of causation" (PC), but PC is typically not identifiable based solely on the EoC probabilities. Nevertheless, these probabilities do enable us to establish bounds on PC, and these can be refined with additional information about the causal process, such as data on covariates or mediators. In such scenarios, it becomes apparent that ignoring or lacking relevant information about the causal process can introduce bias into our analyses. In this article we compare results obtained with and without proper consideration of the causal process, so as to better understand the implications of such oversights.

Keywords: Probability of causation; Bias; Confounding variables; Mediators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40300-024-00283-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:metron:v:83:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s40300-024-00283-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40300

DOI: 10.1007/s40300-024-00283-6

Access Statistics for this article

METRON is currently edited by Marco Alfo'

More articles in METRON from Springer, Sapienza Università di Roma
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-18
Handle: RePEc:spr:metron:v:83:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s40300-024-00283-6