Probabilities of Causation for Continuous Outcomes: Bounds and Identification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chaoge, Jile, Han, Kesen, Liu, Fahui, Wu, Peng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Chaoge, Jile
Han, Kesen
Liu, Fahui
Wu, Peng
author_facet Chaoge, Jile
Han, Kesen
Liu, Fahui
Wu, Peng
contents The probability of necessity (PN), which quantifies the probability that an observed event would not have occurred in the absence of the treatment, is a central estimand in attribution analysis. While PN has been extensively studied for binary outcomes and has recently been developed for ordinal outcomes, a formal framework for continuous outcomes remains underdeveloped. To address this gap, we propose the general probability of necessity (GPN) for continuous outcomes, a setting that is substantially more challenging than the binary and ordinal cases. Rather than imposing strong identifiability assumptions, we adopt a partial identification perspective and derive sharp lower and upper bounds under standard assumptions of ignorability and monotonicity. We further introduce a copula-based framework that exploits dependence information between potential outcomes to tighten these bounds. Simulation studies and real-world applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01883
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Probabilities of Causation for Continuous Outcomes: Bounds and Identification
Chaoge, Jile
Han, Kesen
Liu, Fahui
Wu, Peng
Methodology
The probability of necessity (PN), which quantifies the probability that an observed event would not have occurred in the absence of the treatment, is a central estimand in attribution analysis. While PN has been extensively studied for binary outcomes and has recently been developed for ordinal outcomes, a formal framework for continuous outcomes remains underdeveloped. To address this gap, we propose the general probability of necessity (GPN) for continuous outcomes, a setting that is substantially more challenging than the binary and ordinal cases. Rather than imposing strong identifiability assumptions, we adopt a partial identification perspective and derive sharp lower and upper bounds under standard assumptions of ignorability and monotonicity. We further introduce a copula-based framework that exploits dependence information between potential outcomes to tighten these bounds. Simulation studies and real-world applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
title Probabilities of Causation for Continuous Outcomes: Bounds and Identification
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01883