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产前酒精暴露与儿童认知：半连续暴露的因果推断与证据综合AI 解读

We address the challenge of causal inference status and the dose-response effects with a semi-continuous exposure. A two-stage approach is proposed using estimating equation for multiple outcomes with large sample properties derived for the resulting estimators. Homogeneity tests are developed to assess whether causal effects of exposure status and the dose-response effects are the same across multiple outcomes. A global homogeneity test is also developed to assess whether…

因果中介分析的平衡权重AI 解读

This paper develops methods for estimating the natural direct and indirect effects in causal mediation analysis. The efficient influence function-based estimator (EIF-based estimator) and the inverse probability weighting estimator (IPW estimator), which are standard in causal mediation analysis, both rely on the inverse of the estimated propensity scores, and thus they are vulnerable to two key issues (i) instability and (ii) finite-sample covariate imbalance. We propose…

价格暴露设计的微观基础与因果解释AI 解读

This paper studies regional exposure designs that use commodity prices as instruments to study local effects of aggregate shocks. Unlike standard shift share designs that leverage differential exposure to many shocks, the price exposure relies on exogenous variation from a single shock, leading to challenges for both identification and inference. We motivate the design using a multi sector labor model. Under the model and a potential outcomes framework, we characterize the…

分批自适应实验的统计推断AI 解读

The advantages of adaptive experiments have led to their rapid adoption in economics, other fields, as well as among practitioners. However, adaptive experiments pose challenges for causal inference. This note suggests a BOLS (batched ordinary least squares) test statistic for inference of treatment effects in adaptive experiments. The statistic provides a precision-equalizing aggregation of per-period treatment-control differences under heteroskedasticity. The combined test…

CFLight：通过反事实学习提升交通信号控制安全性AI 解读

Traffic accidents result in millions of injuries and fatalities globally, with a significant number occurring at intersections each year. Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is an effective strategy for enhancing safety at these urban junctures. Despite the growing popularity of Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods in optimizing TSC, these methods often prioritize driving efficiency over safety, thus failing to address the critical balance between these two aspects. Additionally,…

协变量自适应随机化下无缝Ⅱ/Ⅲ期试验的模型稳健推断AI 解读

Seamless phase II/III trials have become a cornerstone of modern drug development, offering a means to accelerate evaluation while maintaining statistical rigor. However, most existing inference procedures are model-based, designed primarily for continuous outcomes, and often neglect the stratification used in covariate-adaptive randomization (CAR), limiting their practical relevance. In this paper, we propose a unified, model-robust framework for seamless phase II/III…

右删失竞争风险数据中累积发生函数差的多重稳健估计AI 解读

In causal inference, estimating the average treatment effect is a central objective, and in the context of competing risks data, this effect can be quantified by the cause-specific cumulative incidence function (CIF) difference. While doubly robust estimators give a more robust way to estimate the causal effect from the observational study, they remain inconsistent if both models are misspecified. To improve the robustness, we develop a multiply robust estimator for the…

边际干预效应AI 解读

Conventional causal estimands, such as the average treatment effect (ATE), capture how the mean outcome in a population or subpopulation would change if all units were assigned to treatment versus control. Real-world policy changes, however, are often incremental, changing treatment status for only a small segment of the population -- those at or near the "margin of participation." To formalize this idea, two parallel literatures in economics and in statistics and…

网络干扰下修正处理政策的因果效应AI 解读

Modified treatment policies are a widely applicable class of interventions useful for studying the causal effects of continuous exposures. Approaches to evaluating their causal effects assume no interference, meaning that such effects cannot be learned from data in settings where the exposure of one unit affects the outcomes of others, as is common in spatial or network data. We introduce a new class of intervention, induced modified treatment policies, which we show…

基于核匹配的处理效应估计AI 解读

Kernel matching is a widely used technique for estimating treatment effects, particularly valuable in observational studies where randomized controlled trials are not feasible. While kernel-matching approaches have demonstrated practical advantages in exploiting similarities between treated and control units, their theoretical properties have remained only partially explored. In this paper, we make a key contribution by establishing the asymptotic normality and consistency…