Learning sources of variability from high-dimensional observational studies

Causal inference studies whether the presence of a variable influences an observed outcome. As measured by quantities such as the "average treatment effect," this paradigm is employed across numerous biological fields, from vaccine and drug development to policy interventions. Unfortunately, the majority of these methods are often limited to univariate outcomes. Our work generalizes causal estimands to outcomes with any number of dimensions or any measurable space, and formulates traditional causal estimands for nominal variables as causal discrepancy tests. We propose a simple technique for adjusting universally consistent conditional independence tests and prove that these tests are universally consistent causal discrepancy tests. Numerical experiments illustrate that our method, Causal CDcorr, leads to improvements in both finite sample validity and power when compared to existing strategies. Our methods are all open source and available at github.com/ebridge2/cdcorr.

GraSPy: Graph Statistics in Python

We introduce GraSPy, a Python library devoted to statistical inference, machine learning, and visualization of random graphs and graph populations. This package provides flexible and easy-to-use algorithms for analyzing and understanding graphs with a scikit-learn compliant API. GraSPy can be downloaded from Python Package Index (PyPi), and is released under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. The documentation and all releases are available at https://neurodata.io/graspy.