Generalized Instrumental Variables

Abstract

This paper concerns the assessment of direct causal effects from a combination of: (i) non-experimental data, and (ii) qualitative domain knowledge. Domain knowledge is encoded in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), in which all interactions are assumed linear, and some variables are presumed to be unobserved. We provide a generalization of the well-known method of Instrumental Variables, which allows its application to models with few conditional independeces.