Surrogate outcomes and transportability

Abstract

Identification of causal effects is one of the most fundamental tasks of causal inference. We consider an identifiability problem where some experimental and observational data are available but neither data alone is sufficient for the identification of the causal effect of interest. Instead of the outcome of interest, surrogate outcomes are measured in the experiments. This problem is a generalization of identifiability using surrogate experiments [1] and we label it as surrogate outcome identifiability. We show that the concept of transportability [2] provides a sufficient criteria for determining surrogate outcome identifiability for a large class of queries.