Code repository & Versions

DoWhy is hosted on GitHub.

You can browse the code in a html-friendly format here.

v0.5-beta: Enhanced documentation and support for causal mediation

Installation

• DoWhy can be installed on Conda now!

Code

• Support for identification by mediation formula

• Support for the front-door criterion

• Linear estimation methods for mediation

• Generalized backdoor criterion implementation using paths and d-separation

• Added GLM estimators, including logistic regression

• New API for interpreting causal models, estimates and refuters. First interpreter by @ErikHambardzumyan visualizes how the distribution of confounder changes

• Friendlier error messages for propensity score stratification estimator when there is not enough data in a bin

• Enhancements to the dummy outcome refuter with machine learned components–now can simulate non-zero effects too. Ready for alpha testing

Docs

• New case studies using DoWhy on hotel booking cancellations and membership rewards programs

• New notebook on using DoWhy+EconML for estimating effect of multiple treatments

• A tutorial on causal inference using DoWhy and EconML

• Better organization of docs and notebooks on the documentation website.

Community

• Created a contributors page with guidelines for contributing

• Added allcontributors bot so that new contributors can added just after their pull requests are merged

A big thanks to @Tanmay-Kulkarni101, @ErikHambardzumyan, @Sid-darthvader for their contributions.

v0.4-beta: Powerful refutations and better support for heterogeneous treatment effects

• DummyOutcomeRefuter now includes machine learning functions to increase power of the refutation.

  • In addition to generating a random dummy outcome, now you can generate a dummyOutcome that is an arbitrary function of confounders but always independent of treatment, and then test whether the estimated treatment effect is zero. This is inspired by ideas from the T-learner.

  • We also provide default machine learning-based methods to estimate such a dummyOutcome based on confounders. Of course, you can specify any custom ML method.

• Added a new BootstrapRefuter that simulates the issue of measurement error with confounders. Rather than a simple bootstrap, you can generate bootstrap samples with noise on the values of the confounders and check how sensitive the estimate is.

  • The refuter supports custom selection of the confounders to add noise to.

• All refuters now provide confidence intervals and a significance value.

• Better support for heterogeneous effect libraries like EconML and CausalML

  • All CausalML methods can be called directly from DoWhy, in addition to all methods from EconML.

  • [Change to naming scheme for estimators] To achieve a consistent naming scheme for estimators, we suggest to prepend internal dowhy estimators with the string “dowhy”. For example, “backdoor.dowhy.propensity_score_matching”. Not a breaking change, so you can keep using the old naming scheme too.

  • EconML-specific: Since EconML assumes that effect modifiers are a subset of confounders, a warning is issued if a user specifies effect modifiers outside of confounders and tries to use EconML methods.

• CI and Standard errors: Added bootstrap-based confidence intervals and standard errors for all methods. For linear regression estimator, also implemented the corresponding parametric forms.

• Convenience functions for getting confidence intervals, standard errors and conditional treatment effects (CATE), that can be called after fitting the estimator if needed

• Better coverage for tests. Also, tests are now seeded with a random seed, so more dependable tests.

Thanks to @Tanmay-Kulkarni101 and @Arshiaarya for their contributions!

v0.2-alpha: CATE estimation and integration with EconML

This release includes many major updates:

• (BREAKING CHANGE) The CausalModel import is now simpler: “from dowhy import CausalModel”

• Multivariate treatments are now supported.

• Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) can be estimated for any subset of the data. Includes integration with EconML–any method from EconML can be called using DoWhy through the estimate_effect method (see example notebook).

• Other than CATE, specific target estimands like ATT and ATC are also supported for many of the estimation methods.

• For reproducibility, you can specify a random seed for all refutation methods.

• Multiple bug fixes and updates to the documentation.

Includes contributions from @j-chou, @ktmud, @jrfiedler, @shounak112358, @Lnk2past. Thank you all!

v0.1.1-alpha: First release

This is the first release of the library.