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Causal EpiNets: Precision-corrected Bounds on Individual Treatment Effects using Epistemic Neural Networks

Gandharv Patil, Keyi Tang, Raquel Aoki, Leo Guelman

arXiv 8 May 2026 · Statistics — Machine Learning

arXiv:2605.07065 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Individual treatment effects are not point-identified from data. The Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS) circumvents this limitation by characterizing individual-level causality through intersection bounds derived from combined experimental and observational data. In finite samples, however, standard plug-in estimators systematically fail: they violate structural probability constraints and suffer from extremum bias induced by max-min operators, yielding spuriously narrow intervals. We propose a neural framework for finite-sample PNS estimation that resolves both pathologies. We introduce an anchored neural architecture that guarantees structural constraint satisfaction by construction. To correct extremum bias, we employ precision-corrected intersection-bound inference, leveraging Epistemic Neural Networks for scalable, high-dimensional uncertainty quantification. Empirical evaluations confirm that this approach maintains nominal coverage and exact constraint validity in high-dimensional regimes where standard estimators systematically undercover.

Citation extraction

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
osband2023epistemicunmatched citation key osband2023epistemic0.9285380%
2Tian, Jin and Pearl, Judea (2000) Probabilities of Causation: Bounds and Identification0.8307557%
3Chernozhukov, Victor and Lee, Sokbae and Rosen, Adam M (2013) Intersection Bounds: Estimation and Inference0.77313546%
4Li, Ang and Mao, Ruirui and Pearl, Judea (2022) Probabilities of Causation: Adequate Size of Experimental and Observational Samples0.5113233%
5ACIC (2019) ACIC 2019 Data Challenge Datasets0.40511100%
6Charpentier, Bertrand and Zügner, Daniel and Günnemann, Stephan (2020) Posterior Network: Uncertainty Estimation without OOD Samples via Density-Based Pseudo-Counts0.40511100%
7Jacot, Arthur and Gabriel, Franck and Hongler, Clément (2018) Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks0.40511100%
8Kawakami, Yuta and Kuroki, Manabu and Tian, Jin (2024) Probabilities of Causation for Continuous and Vector Variables0.40511100%
9Li, Ang and Pearl, Judea (2024) Probabilities of Causation with Nonbinary Treatment and Effect0.40511100%
10Osband, Ian and Aslanides, John and Cassirer, Albin (2018) Randomized Prior Functions for Deep Reinforcement Learning0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 37 scored citations. 1 of these could not be matched to a bibliography entry, so only the citation key is shown.