Kernel Single Proxy Control for Deterministic Confounding (2308.04585v3)

Abstract: We consider the problem of causal effect estimation with an unobserved confounder, where we observe a proxy variable that is associated with the confounder. Although Proxy causal learning (PCL) uses two proxy variables to recover the true causal effect, we show that a single proxy variable is sufficient for causal estimation if the outcome is generated deterministically, generalizing Control Outcome Calibration Approach (COCA). We propose two kernel-based methods for this setting: the first based on the two-stage regression approach, and the second based on a maximum moment restriction approach. We prove that both approaches can consistently estimate the causal effect, and we empirically demonstrate that we can successfully recover the causal effect on challenging synthetic benchmarks.