AAAI 2026

January 23, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

Detecting unobserved confounders is crucial for reliable causal inference in observational studies. Existing methods require either linearity assumptions or multiple heterogeneous environments, limiting applicability to nonlinear single-environment settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Kernel Regression Confounder Detection (KRCD), a novel method for detecting unobserved confounding in nonlinear observational data under single-environment conditions. KRCD leverages reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces to model complex dependencies. By comparing standard and higher-order kernel regressions, we derive a test statistic whose significant deviation from zero indicates unobserved confounding. Theoretically, we prove two key results: First, in infinite samples, regression coefficients coincide if and only if no unobserved confounders exist. Second, finite-sample differences converge to zero-mean Gaussian distributions with tractable variance. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and the Twins dataset demonstrate that KRCD not only outperforms existing baselines but also achieves superior computational efficiency.

Downloads

Paper

Next from AAAI 2026

MARLIN: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Incremental DAG Discovery
poster

MARLIN: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Incremental DAG Discovery

AAAI 2026

+4
Zhong Chen and 6 other authors

23 January 2026

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2025 Underline - All rights reserved