{"paper":{"title":"Rethinking Software Empirical Studies with Structural Causal Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.SE","authors_text":"Antonio Mastropaolo, Aya Garryyeva, Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas, David Nader Palacio, Denys Poshyvanyk","submitted_at":"2026-05-27T13:41:05Z","abstract_excerpt":"Causal Inference offers a fundamental approach for advancing empirical software engineering (ESE) beyond traditional statistical association, enabling researchers to rigorously identify and quantify causal relationships in software experiments. This paper introduces CausalSE, a framework that operationalizes Judea Pearl's causal inference paradigm in ESE context. The paper focuses on Structural Causal Models (SCMs) to address the limitations of classical statistical methods in mitigating confounding bias. Through a case study using the Galeras dataset and propensity score matching, we demonstr"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.28482","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.28482/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}