Life sciences · Preprint
arXiv · September 30, 2026
No summary has been generated for this record yet. What follows is drawn from its source metadata only.
Preprint.
No findings were extractable from the material analysed.
Safety was not reported in the material analysed. Check the source before drawing any conclusion about harm.
The source did not state who this applies to in practice.
Graded across the dimensions that decide whether you should act, each from what the source actually supports. There is no single score, and where a dimension was not assessed it says so.
This record has not been graded across any dimension yet. Treat the label above as provisional and read the source.
What is missing. This record has no bottom line, key findings, reported figures, evidence dimensions. That is a gap in the analysis, not a judgement about the study.
Estimating causal effects from observational data is central to science and policy, but the effects are not identified when confounders are unmeasured. Proximal causal inference addresses this problem with proxies of the unmeasured confounders. However, existing proxy-based approaches either designate proxy roles and solve an inverse problem, which is ill-posed and hard to estimate with high-dimensional proxies, or use a latent-variable model, which assumes that the learned latent variable matches the hidden confounder and leaves bias when it does not. To address these challenges, we introduce proximal balancing. It carries the classical idea of covariate balancing to confounders that are observed only through proxies: it learns a low-dimensional summary of the covariates and proxies that makes the treatment groups comparable, and then adjusts for this summary. It needs no designated proxy roles, inverse problem, or latent model. We give identification theory, finite-sample guarantees, and a practical algorithm, PROBE. We demonstrate the method on low-dimensional, high-dimensional, and image proxies and on real-world data.