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离散情形下因果推断的自动化方法AI 解读

When causal quantities cannot be point identified, researchers often pursue partial identification to quantify the range of possible values. However, the peculiarities of applied research conditions can make this analytically intractable. We present a general and automated approach to causal inference in discrete settings. We show causal questions with discrete data reduce to polynomial programming problems, and we present an algorithm to automatically bound causal effects…

空间混杂的谱域调整AI 解读

Summary Adjusting for an unmeasured confounder is generally an intractable problem, but in the spatial setting it may be possible under certain conditions. We derive necessary conditions on the coherence between the exposure and the unmeasured confounder that ensure the effect of exposure is estimable. We specify our model and assumptions in the spectral domain to allow for different degrees of confounding at different spatial resolutions. One assumption that ensures…

观察性研究中非精确匹配的统计作用AI 解读

Summary In observational causal inference, exact covariate matching plays two statistical roles: (i) it effectively controls for bias due to measured confounding; (ii) it justifies assumption-free inference based on randomization tests. In this paper we show that inexact covariate matching does not always play these same roles. We find that inexact matching often leaves behind statistically meaningful bias, and that this bias renders standard randomization tests…

群组效应异质性与干扰下的时变因果效应调节AI 解读

Summary The micro-randomized trial is a sequential randomized experimental design to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of mobile health intervention components that may be delivered at hundreds or thousands of decision points. Micro-randomized trials have motivated a new class of causal estimands, termed causal excursion effects, for which semiparametric inference can be conducted via a weighted, centred least-squares criterion (Boruvka et al., 2018). Causal excursion…

变量消除、图约简与有效 g 公式AI 解读

Summary We study efficient estimation of an interventional mean associated with a point exposure treatment under a causal graphical model represented by a directed acyclic graph without hidden variables. Under such a model, a subset of the variables may be uninformative, in that failure to measure them neither precludes identification of the interventional mean nor changes the semiparametric variance bound for regular estimators of it. We develop a set of graphical criteria…

用于因果推断的线性回归隐含权重AI 解读

Summary A basic principle in the design of observational studies is to approximate the randomized experiment that would have been conducted under ideal circumstances. At present, linear regression models are commonly used to analyse observational data and estimate causal effects. How do linear regression adjustments in observational studies emulate key features of randomized experiments, such as covariate balance, self-weighted sampling and study representativeness? In this…

说服效应的识别AI 解读

This paper examines a commonly used measure of persuasion whose precise interpretation has been obscure in the literature. By using the potential outcome framework, we define the causal persuasion rate by a proper conditional probability of taking the action of interest with a persuasive message conditional on not taking the action without the message. We then formally study identification under empirically relevant data scenarios and show that the commonly adopted measure…

离线强化学习中的投影状态—动作平衡权重AI 解读

Off-policy evaluation is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly different policy, under the framework of infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. Motivated by the recently developed marginal importance sampling method in RL and the covariate balancing idea in causal inference, we propose a novel estimator with…

序贯可忽略性下部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程的离策略评估AI 解读

We consider off-policy evaluation of dynamic treatment rules under sequential ignorability, given an assumption that the underlying system can be modeled as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). We propose an estimator, partial history importance weighting, and show that it can consistently estimate the stationary mean rewards of a target policy, given long enough draws from the behavior policy. We provide an upper bound on its error that decays polynomially…

非可分三角模型中个体处理效应的推断AI 解读

In nonseparable triangular models with a binary endogenous treatment and a binary instrumental variable, Vuong and Xu (2017) established identification results for individual treatment effects (ITEs) under the rank invariance assumption. Using their approach, Feng et al. (2019) proposed a uniformly consistent kernel estimator for the density of the ITE that utilizes estimated ITEs. In this paper, we establish the asymptotic normality of the density estimator of Feng et al.…

双重差分的新进展：近期计量文献的综合梳理AI 解读

This paper synthesizes recent advances in the econometrics of difference-in-differences (DiD) and provides concrete recommendations for practitioners. We begin by articulating a simple set of “canonical” assumptions under which the econometrics of DiD are well-understood. We then argue that recent advances in DiD methods can be broadly classified as relaxing some components of the canonical DiD setup, with a focus on (i) multiple periods and variation in treatment timing,…

存在溢出与不依从的实验中如何识别因果效应AI 解读

This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers–one person’s treatment may affect another’s outcome–and one-sided non-compliance—subjects can only be offered treatment, not compelled to take it up. Two distinct causal effects are of interest in this setting: direct effects quantify how a person’s own treatment changes her outcome, while indirect effects quantify how her peers’…

价值函数的一致推断AI 解读

We propose a method to conduct uniform inference for the (optimal) value function, that is, the function that results from optimizing an objective function marginally over one of its arguments. Marginal optimization is not Hadamard differentiable (that is, compactly differentiable) as a map between the spaces of objective and value functions, which is problematic because standard inference methods for nonlinear maps usually rely on Hadamard differentiability. However, we…

集合识别线性模型的去偏机器学习AI 解读

This paper provides estimation and inference methods for an identified set’s boundary (i.e., support function) where the selection among a very large number of covariates is based on modern regularized tools. I characterize the boundary using a semiparametric moment equation. Combining Neyman-orthogonality and sample splitting ideas, I construct a root-N consistent, uniformly asymptotically Gaussian estimator of the boundary and propose a multiplier bootstrap procedure to…

同伴效应与内生社会互动AI 解读

This paper proposes a solution to the problem of endogenous selection of peers in the linear-in-means model. We do not require to specify a model for how the selection of peers comes about. Rather, we exploit two restrictions that are inherent in many such specifications to construct conditional moment conditions. The restrictions in question are that link decisions that involve a given individual are not all independent of one another, but that they are independent of the…

拍卖决定合同中的激励效应与选择效应区分AI 解读

This paper develops a novel approach to estimate how contract and principal–agent characteristics influence a post-auction outcome when the matching between agents and principals derives from an auction process. We propose a control-function approach to account jointly for the endogeneity of contracts and matching. This consists of, first, estimating the primitives of an interdependent values auction model – which is shown to be non-parametrically identified from the bidding…

扩展Roy模型的非参数识别与估计AI 解读

We propose a new identification method for the extended Roy model, in which the agents maximize their utility rather than just their outcome. We nonparametrically identify the joint distribution of potential outcomes, which is of great importance in causal inference. We exploit the extended Roy model structure and the monotonicity assumption but do not require any functional form assumption nor any support assumption. The identification is achieved by matching the…

含内生解释变量的非可分二元响应模型中的部分识别AI 解读

This paper considers (partial) identification of a variety of counterfactual parameters in binary response models with possibly endogenous regressors. Our framework allows for nonseparable index functions with multi-dimensional latent variables, and does not require parametric distributional assumptions. We leverage results on hyperplane arrangements and cell enumeration from the literature on computational geometry in order to provide a tractable means of computing the…

不完整数据矩模型中的部分识别与推断AI 解读

In this paper, we develop asymptotically valid inference in moment equality models with incomplete data, where the sample information is insufficient to identify the joint distribution of all the variables in the model. Examples of such models include the selection-on-observables framework, the counterfactual distribution, and parametric regressions with incomplete data. In the first two examples, the parameter of interest includes the values of the distribution and quantile…

双向固定效应中的事件研究与分布滞后：识别、等价及推广AI 解读

Summary We discuss three important properties of panel data event study designs. First, assuming constant treatment effects before and/or after some event time, also known as binning, is a natural restriction, which identifies dynamic treatment effects in the absence of never‐treated units. Second, event study designs with binned endpoints and distributed‐lag models are numerically identical. Third, classic dummy variable event study designs can be generalized to models that…

何时可以忽略断点运行变量的测量误差？AI 解读

Summary In many applications of regression discontinuity designs, the running variable used to assign treatment is only observed with error. We show that, provided the observed running variable (i) correctly classifies treatment assignment and (ii) affects the conditional means of potential outcomes smoothly, ignoring the measurement error nonetheless yields an estimate with a causal interpretation: the average treatment effect for units whose observed running variable…

无效工具变量下的因果推断：选择后问题及搜索与抽样方案AI 解读

Abstract Instrumental variable methods are among the most commonly used causal inference approaches to deal with unmeasured confounders in observational studies. The presence of invalid instruments is the primary concern for practical applications, and a fast-growing area of research is inference for the causal effect with possibly invalid instruments. This paper illustrates that the existing confidence intervals may undercover when the valid and invalid instruments are hard…

变分矩方法AI 解读

Abstract The conditional moment problem is a powerful formulation for describing structural causal parameters in terms of observables, a prominent example being instrumental variable regression. We introduce a very general class of estimators called the variational method of moments (VMM), motivated by a variational minimax reformulation of optimally weighted generalized method of moments for finite sets of moments. VMM controls infinitely for many moments characterized by…

分布偏移下的统计检验AI 解读

Abstract We introduce statistical testing under distributional shifts. We are interested in the hypothesis P*∈H0 for a target distribution P*, but observe data from a different distribution Q*. We assume that P* is related to Q* through a known shift τ and formally introduce hypothesis testing in this setting. We propose a general testing procedure that first resamples from the observed data to construct an auxiliary data set (similarly to sampling importance resampling) and…