Stanford University · Department of Statistics

Dominik Rothenhäusler

Assistant Professor of Statistics

David Huntington Dean's Faculty Scholar · Chamber Fellow

Statistical methods for distribution shift, causal inference, and replicability.

P (density) shifted densities move your mouse

About

My research develops statistical methods for distribution shift, causal inference, and replicability; with the goal of making predictions trustworthy and scientific conclusions reproducible when the population that generated the training data differs from the one we ultimately care about.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2018 at ETH Zürich under Nicolai Meinshausen and Peter Bühlmann, followed by a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Bin Yu, Jasjeet Sekhon, and Peter Bickel. I joined the Stanford Department of Statistics in 2019. An applied strand of the work uses machine learning to help connect refugees with resettlement locations where they are likely to thrive.

Dominik Rothenhäusler in the Stanford arcade

News

Recent

2026 · Aug
New preprint — “Augmented Inverse Hybrid Weighting: robust inference under deterministic and random distribution shifts” (with Ying Jin). arXiv:2608.00701. A single estimator that combines reweighting with regression augmentation to stay valid under both systematic covariate shift and dense random shift.
2026
Awarded the Frontiers of Science Award — jointly with Nicolai Meinshausen, Peter Bühlmann, and Jonas Peters — for making regression robust to structured distribution shifts. Recognizing anchor regression, which ties distributional robustness to causality and made regression stable under structured shifts.
2026
Out-of-distribution generalization under random, dense distributional shifts” (with Yujin Jeong) accepted at the Journal of the American Statistical Association. How to infer low-dimensional targets when the whole distribution drifts through many small, random changes.
2026
Diagnosing the role of observable distribution shift in scientific replications” (with Ying Jin and Kevin Guo) published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C. Diagnostics that quantify how much of a replication gap is explained by observable shift between study populations.
2026 · Summer
Speaking on “Augmented Inverse Hybrid Weighting: robust inference under deterministic and random shifts” at JSM. Robust generalization of findings when populations shift both systematically and at random.
2025
Beyond reweighting: On the predictive role of covariate shift in effect generalization” (with Ying Jin and Naoki Egami) published in PNAS. Covariate shift is predictive (not just a nuisance) when generalizing treatment effects to new populations.
2025 · Nov
New preprint — “Nonparametric Regression for Random Unbiased Perturbations” (with Anna Lyubarskaja). Random perturbations of the conditional law inflate variance rather than bias, cutting the effective sample size and changing how bandwidths should be chosen — with matching minimax lower bounds.
2025 · May
New preprint — “Which Covariates to Adjust for? Specification-robust Causal Inference in Observational Studies” (with Aditya Ghosh). A single estimate and confidence interval that stay valid as long as at least one candidate adjustment set is, at the usual parametric rate.
2025 · Apr
New preprint — “Predicting data value before collection: A coefficient for prioritizing sources under random distribution shift” (with Ivy Zhang). The Data Usefulness Coefficient predicts how much a candidate dataset will reduce prediction error, from covariate summary statistics alone and no outcome data.

Preprints & Publications

Selected work

Preprints

Augmented Inverse Hybrid Weighting: robust inference under deterministic and random distribution shifts

Ying Jin, Dominik Rothenhäusler.

Which Covariates to Adjust for? Specification-robust Causal Inference in Observational Studies

Aditya Ghosh, Dominik Rothenhäusler. major revision at the Annals of Statistics.

Nonparametric Regression for Random Unbiased Perturbations

Anna Lyubarskaja, Dominik Rothenhäusler.

CTRL Your Shift: Clustered Transfer Residual Learning for Many Small Datasets

Gauri Jain, Dominik Rothenhäusler, Kirk Bansak, Elisabeth Paulson.

Optimal Empirical Risk Minimization under Temporal Distribution Shifts

Yujing Jeong, Ramesh Johari, Dominik Rothenhäusler, Emily Fox.

Predicting data value before collection: A coefficient for prioritizing sources under random distribution shift

Ivy Zhang, Dominik Rothenhäusler.
2026

Diagnosing the role of observable distribution shift in scientific replications

Ying Jin, Kevin Guo, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C.

Out-of-distribution generalization under random, dense distributional shifts

Yujin Jeong, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
2025

Calibrated inference: statistical inference that accounts for both sampling uncertainty and distributional uncertainty

Yujin Jeong, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Journal of Machine Learning Research.

Beyond reweighting: On the predictive role of covariate shift in effect generalization

Ying Jin, Naoki Egami, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(45).
2024

Learning under random distributional shifts

Kirk Bansak, Elisabeth Paulson, Dominik Rothenhäusler. AISTATS (PMLR).

Tailored inference for finite populations: conditional validity and transfer across distributions

Ying Jin, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Biometrika.

Model selection for estimation of causal parameters

Dominik Rothenhäusler. Electronic Journal of Statistics.
2023

Modular Regression: Improving Linear Models by Incorporating Auxiliary Data

Ying Jin, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Journal of Machine Learning Research.

The s-value: evaluating stability with respect to distributional shifts

Suyash Gupta, Dominik Rothenhäusler. NeurIPS.

Distributionally robust and generalizable inference

Peter Bühlmann, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Statistical Science.
2022

On the statistical role of inexact matching in observational studies

Kevin Guo, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Biometrika.

Causal aggregation: estimation and inference of causal effects by constraint-based data fusion

Jaime Gimenez, Dominik Rothenhäusler. Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Earlier

Anchor regression: heterogeneous data meets causality

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Peter Bühlmann, Nicolai Meinshausen, Jonas Peters. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 2021. · David Cox Prize · Frontiers of Science Award

Causal Dantzig: fast inference in linear structural equation models with hidden variables under additive interventions

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Peter Bühlmann, Nicolai Meinshausen. Annals of Statistics, 2019.

Causal inference in partially linear structural equation models: identifiability and estimation

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Jan Ernest, Peter Bühlmann. Annals of Statistics, 2018.

Guilt in voting and public good games

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Nikolaus Schweizer, Nora Szech. European Economic Review, 2017.

BackShift: learning causal cyclic graphs from unknown shift interventions

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Christina Heinze, Jonas Peters, Nicolai Meinshausen. NeurIPS, 2015.

Confidence intervals for maximin effects in inhomogeneous large-scale data

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Nicolai Meinshausen, Peter Bühlmann. Statistical Analysis for High-Dimensional Data (Springer), 2016.

Also: robust factor selection for biosimilar antibody production (Biotechnology Progress, 2017) and further work on economics & moral behavior. Full list on Google Scholar.

Mentoring

Students

Current Ph.D. students

Ivy Zhang Ivy Zhang
distribution shift & data prioritization · co-advised with Rob Tibshirani
Aditya Ghosh Aditya Ghosh
specification-robust causal inference · co-advised with Stefan Wager
Anna Lyubarskaja Anna Lyubarskaja
minimax-optimal predictions under random perturbations · co-advised with Sourav Chatterjee

Student collaborators

Yujin Jeong Yujin Jeong
distributional uncertainty & temporal shift · previously advised by Emily Fox
Jaime Roquero Gimenez Jaime Roquero Gimenez
causal aggregation & data fusion · previously advised by James Zou
Suyash Gupta Suyash Gupta
stability & the s-value · previously advised by John Duchi

Former Ph.D. students

Ying Jin Ying Jin
distribution shift, causal inference, replication · co-advised with Emmanuel Candès · now Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Kevin Guo Kevin Guo
observational studies, replication studies · now OpenAI

Teaching

Courses at Stanford

STATS 361Causal InferenceSpring 2026
STATS 305BApplied Statistics IIWinter 2026
STATS 209Introduction to Causal InferenceFall 2025
— on sabbatical, 2024–2025 —
STATS 207/307Introduction to Time Series AnalysisSpring 2024
STATS 209Introduction to Causal InferenceFall 2023
STATS 361Causal InferenceSpring 2023
STATS 305BApplied Statistics IIWinter 2023
STATS 200Statistical InferenceWinter 2023
STATS 300ATheory of StatisticsFall 2022
STATS 209Introduction to Causal InferenceFall 2022
STATS 361Causal InferenceSpring 2021
STATS 300ATheory of StatisticsFall 2019 · 2020

Impact & Service

Online Causal Inference Seminar

I am a co-founder and co-organizer of the Online Causal Inference Seminar (OCIS), the leading online seminar in the field. Launched in 2020 during the pandemic, it draws roughly 50–70 attendees each week and has passed 350,000 views on YouTube — a platform for established researchers and early-career scientists alike.

Referee & editorial service

JRSS-B · Biometrika · JASA · Annals of Statistics · Operations Research · Biometrics · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · NeurIPS (area chair, 2022) · UAI · Scandinavian Journal of Statistics.

Refugee resettlement

With the Immigration Policy Lab, Kirk Bansak (UC Berkeley), and Elisabeth Paulson (Harvard), I build data-driven approaches that connect refugees with resettlement locations where they are most likely to integrate successfully. The central statistical challenge is non-stationarity — both the economy and the characteristics of arriving refugees keep changing — so the algorithms are designed to stay robust to those shifts. IPL’s tools have been deployed in the United States, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and the work was featured by Stanford’s Impact Labs.