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异质性因果效应估计的极小极大收敛率AI 解读

Estimation of heterogeneous causal effects - i.e., how effects of policies and treatments vary across subjects - is a fundamental task in causal inference. Many methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) have been proposed in recent years, but questions surrounding optimality have remained largely unanswered. In particular, a minimax theory of optimality has yet to be developed, with the minimax rate of convergence and construction of rate-optimal…

条件可分离效应AI 解读

Researchers are often interested in treatment effects on outcomes that are only defined conditional on posttreatment events. For example, in a study of the effect of different cancer treatments on quality of life at end of follow-up, the quality of life of individuals who die during the study is undefined. In these settings, naive contrasts of outcomes conditional on posttreatment events are not average causal effects, even in randomized experiments. Therefore, the effect in…

无环有向混合图的嵌套马尔可夫性质AI 解读

Conditional independence models associated with directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) may be characterized in at least three different ways: via a factorization, the global Markov property (given by the d-separation criterion), and the local Markov property. Marginals of DAG models also imply equality constraints that are not conditional independences; the well-known “Verma constraint” is an example. Constraints of this type are used for testing edges, and in a computationally…

存在竞争事件时用于因果推断的可分离效应AI 解读

In time-to-event settings, the presence of competing events complicates the definition of causal effects. Here we propose the new separable effects to study the causal effect of a treatment on an event of interest. The separable direct effect is the treatment effect on the event of interest not mediated by its effect on the competing event. The separable indirect effect is the treatment effect on the event of interest only through its effect on the competing event. Similar…

局部稳健的半参数估计AI 解读

Many economic and causal parameters depend on nonparametric or high dimensional first steps. We give a general construction of locally robust/orthogonal moment functions for GMM, where first steps have no effect, locally, on average moment functions. Using these orthogonal moments reduces model selection and regularization bias, as is important in many applications, especially for machine learning first steps. Also, associated standard errors are robust to misspecification…

无直接效应假设下最优策略的有效估计AI 解读

Lin Liua , Zach Shahnb, James M. Robinsc* & Andrea Rotnitzkyda Institute of Natural Sciences, School of Mathematical Sciences, MOE-LSC and SJTU-Yale Center for Biostatistics and Data Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China; b IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY; c Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Harvard University, Boston, MA; d Department of Economics, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and CONICET, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaSupplementary materials for…

观察性研究中代表性干预下风险的逆概率加权估计AI 解读

Researchers are often interested in using observational data to estimate the effect on a health outcome of maintaining a continuous treatment within a pre-specified range over time; e.g. "always exercise at least 30 minutes per day". There may be many precise interventions that could achieve this range. In this paper we consider representative interventions. These are special cases of random dynamic interventions; interventions under which treatment at each time is assigned…

工具变量下平均处理效应的部分识别：二元工具、处理与结果的方法综述AI 解读

Several methods have been proposed for partially or point identifying the average treatment effect (ATE) using instrumental variable (IV) type assumptions. The descriptions of these methods are widespread across the statistical, economic, epidemiologic, and computer science literature, and the connections between the methods have not been readily apparent. In the setting of a binary instrument, treatment, and outcome, we review proposed methods for partial and point…

Instrumental variables are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. The discrete instrumental variable model has testable implications for the law of the observed data. However, current assessments of instrumental validity are typically based solely on subject-matter arguments rather than these testable implications, partly due to a lack of formal statistical tests with known properties. In this paper, we develop simple procedures…

Summary We consider estimation of the causal effect of a binary treatment on an outcome, conditionally on covariates, from observational studies or natural experiments in which there is a binary instrument for treatment. We describe a doubly robust, locally efficient estimator of the parameters indexing a model for the local average treatment effect conditionally on covariates V when randomization of the instrument is only true conditionally on a high dimensional vector of…

用于估计干预效应的结构嵌套累积失败时间模型AI 解读

In the presence of time-varying confounders affected by prior treatment, standard statistical methods for failure time analysis may be biased. Methods that correctly adjust for this type of covariate include the parametric g-formula, inverse probability weighted estimation of marginal structural Cox proportional hazards models, and g-estimation of structural nested accelerated failure time models. In this article, we propose a novel method to estimate the causal effect of a…

充分原因交互作用的半参数检验AI 解读

Summary A sufficient cause interaction between two exposures signals the presence of individuals for whom the outcome would occur only under certain values of the two exposures. When the outcome is dichotomous and all exposures are categorical, then, under certain no confounding assumptions, empirical conditions for sufficient cause interactions can be constructed on the basis of the sign of linear contrasts of conditional outcome probabilities between differently exposed…

用于因果推断的带符号有向无环图AI 解读

Summary Formal rules governing signed edges on causal directed acyclic graphs are described and it is shown how these rules can be useful in reasoning about causality. Specifically, the notions of a monotonic effect, a weak monotonic effect and a signed edge are introduced. Results are developed relating these monotonic effects and signed edges to the sign of the causal effect of an intervention in the presence of intermediate variables. The incorporation of signed edges in…

We extend Robins’ theory of causal inference for complex longitudinal data to the case of continuously varying as opposed to discrete covariates and treatments. In particular we establish versions of the key results of the discrete theory: the $g$-computation formula and a collection of powerful characterizations of the $g$-null hypothesis of no treatment effect. This is accomplished under natural continuity hypotheses concerning the conditional distributions of the outcome…

时变暴露对重复二元结局边际均值的因果效应估计AI 解读

We provide sufficient conditions for estimating from longitudinal data the causal effect of a time-dependent exposure or treatment on the marginal probability of response for a dichotomous outcome. We then show how one can estimate this effect under these conditions using the g-computation algorithm of Robins. We also derive the conditions under which some current approaches to the analysis of longitudinal data, such as the generalized estimating equations (GEE) approach of…

非可忽略无应答下重复结局的半参数回归AI 解读

We consider inference about the parameter β* indexing the conditional mean of a vector of correlated outcomes given a vector of explanatory variables when some of the outcomes are missing in a subsample of the study and the probability of response depends on both observed and unobserved data values; that is, nonresponse is nonignorable. We propose a class of augmented inverse probability of response weighted estimators that are consistent and asymptotically normal (CAN) for…

利用工具变量识别因果效应：评论AI 解读

We outline a framework for causal inference in settings where assignment to a binary treatment is ignorable, but compliance with the assignment is not perfect so that the receipt of treatment is nonignorable. To address the problems associated with comparing subjects by the ignorable assignment-an intention-to-treat analysis-we make use of instrumental variables, which have long been used by economists in the context of regression models with constant treatment effects. We…

存在依赖删失时的半参数回归估计AI 解读

We propose a semiparametric estimation procedure for estimating the regression of an outcome Y, measured at the end of a fixed follow-up period, on baseline explanatory variables X, measured prior to start of follow-up, in the presence of dependent censoring given X. The proposed estimators are consistent when the data are ‘missing at random’ but not ‘missing completely at random’ (Rubin, 1976), and do not require full specification of the complete data likelihood.…

缺失数据下重复结局半参数回归模型的分析AI 解读

We propose a class of inverse probability of censoring weighted estimators for the parameters of models for the dependence of the mean of a vector of correlated response variables on a vector of explanatory variables in the presence of missing response data. The proposed estimators do not require full specification of the likelihood. They can be viewed as an extension of generalized estimating equations estimators that allow for the data to be missing at random but not…

依赖删失下的半参数回归估计AI 解读

We propose a semiparametric estimation procedure for estimating the regression of an outcome Y, measured at the end of a fixed follow-up period, on baseline explanatory variables X, measured prior to start of follow-up, in the presence of dependent censoring given X. The proposed estimators are consistent when the data are ‘missing at random’ but not ‘missing completely at random’ (Rubin, 1976), and do not require full specification of the complete data likelihood.…