每日简报

随机试验中二元结局个体化处理效应预测教程AI 解读

Randomized trials typically estimate average relative treatment effects, but decisions on the benefit of a treatment are possibly better informed by more individualized predictions of the absolute treatment effect. In case of a binary outcome, these predictions of absolute individualized treatment effect require knowledge of the individual's risk without treatment and incorporation of a possibly differential treatment effect (i.e. varying with patient characteristics). In…

线性回归中的污染偏差AI 解读

We study regressions with multiple treatments and a set of controls that is flexible enough to purge omitted variable bias. We show that these regressions generally fail to estimate convex averages of heterogeneous treatment effects -- instead, estimates of each treatment's effect are contaminated by non-convex averages of the effects of other treatments. We discuss three estimation approaches that avoid such contamination bias, including the targeting of easiest-to-estimate…

观察性研究倾向得分分析中的因果目标量选择AI 解读

Matching and weighting methods for observational studies involve the choice of an estimand, the causal effect with reference to a specific target population. Commonly used estimands include the average treatment effect in the treated (ATT), the average treatment effect in the untreated (ATU), the average treatment effect in the population (ATE), and the average treatment effect in the overlap (i.e., equipoise population; ATO). Each estimand has its own assumptions,…

受约束分类与政策学习AI 解读

Modern machine learning approaches to classification, including AdaBoost, support vector machines, and deep neural networks, utilize surrogate loss techniques to circumvent the computational complexity of minimizing empirical classification risk. These techniques are also useful for causal policy learning problems, since estimation of individualized treatment rules can be cast as a weighted (cost-sensitive) classification problem. Consistency of the surrogate loss approaches…

概率分布集合间的新度量及其金融异常行为应用AI 解读

This paper introduces a new framework to quantify distance between finite sets with uncertainty present, where probability distributions determine the locations of individual elements. Combining this with a Bayesian change point detection algorithm, we produce a new measure of similarity between time series with respect to their structural breaks. First, we demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness on a collection of piecewise autoregressive processes. Next, we apply this to…

竞争风险评估的替代方法：限制平均损失时间AI 解读

In clinical and epidemiological studies, hazard ratios are often applied to compare treatment effects between two groups for survival data. For competing risks data, the corresponding quantities of interest are cause-specific hazard ratios (cHRs) and subdistribution hazard ratios (sHRs). However, they both have some limitations related to model assumptions and clinical interpretation. Therefore, we recommend restricted mean time lost (RMTL) as an alternative that is easy to…

通过随机缩放实现随机梯度下降的快速稳健在线推断AI 解读

We develop a new method of online inference for a vector of parameters estimated by the Polyak-Ruppert averaging procedure of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms. We leverage insights from time series regression in econometrics and construct asymptotically pivotal statistics via random scaling. Our approach is fully operational with online data and is rigorously underpinned by a functional central limit theorem. Our proposed inference method has a couple of key…

频域格兰杰因果关系：推导与应用AI 解读

Physicists are starting to work in areas where noisy signal analysis is required. In these fields, such as Economics, Neuroscience, and Physics, the notion of causality should be interpreted as a statistical measure. We introduce to the lay reader the Granger causality between two time series and illustrate ways of calculating it: a signal $X$ ``Granger-causes'' a signal $Y$ if the observation of the past of $X$ increases the predictability of the future of $Y$ when compared…

情境多臂老虎机实验后的统计推断AI 解读

Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even best policies. To support credible inference on novel interventions at the end of the study, nonetheless, we still want to construct valid confidence intervals on average treatment effects, subgroup effects, or value of new policies. The…

当市场摩擦具有分数性：高频数据中的粗糙噪声AI 解读

The analysis of high-frequency financial data is often impeded by the presence of noise. This article is motivated by intraday return data in which market microstructure noise appears to be rough, that is, best captured by a continuous-time stochastic process that locally behaves as fractional Brownian motion. Assuming that the underlying efficient price process follows a continuous Itô semimartingale, we derive consistent estimators and asymptotic confidence intervals for…

利用多环境 Knockoff 过滤寻找一致关联AI 解读

This paper develops a method based on model-X knockoffs to find conditional associations that are consistent across diverse environments, controlling the false discovery rate. The motivation for this problem is that large data sets may contain numerous associations that are statistically significant and yet misleading, as they are induced by confounders or sampling imperfections. However, associations consistently replicated under different conditions may be more…

疫情期间使用双向固定效应模型评估政策的局限AI 解读

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple studies rely on two-way fixed effects (FE) models to assess the impact of mitigation policies on health outcomes. Building on the SIRD model of disease transmission, I show that FE models tend to be misspecified for three reasons. First, despite misleading common trends in the pre-treatment period, the parallel trends assumption generally does not hold. Second, heterogeneity in infection rates and infected populations across…

最大熵谱分析及其在引力波数据分析中的应用AI 解读

The Maximum Entropy Spectral Analysis (MESA) method, developed by Burg, offers a powerful tool for spectral estimation of a time-series. It relies on Jaynes' maximum entropy principle, allowing the spectrum of a stochastic process to be inferred using the coefficients of an autoregressive process AR($p$) of order $p$. A closed-form recursive solution provides estimates for both the autoregressive coefficients and the order $p$ of the process. We provide a ready-to-use…

基于新闻的自适应资产定价机器学习模型AI 解读

The paper proposes a new asset pricing model -- the News Embedding UMAP Selection (NEUS) model, to explain and predict the stock returns based on the financial news. Using a combination of various machine learning algorithms, we first derive a company embedding vector for each basis asset from the financial news. Then we obtain a collection of the basis assets based on their company embedding. After that for each stock, we select the basis assets to explain and predict the…

一般干预模式下面板处理效应的学习AI 解读

The problem of causal inference with panel data is a central econometric question. The following is a fundamental version of this problem: Let $M^*$ be a low rank matrix and $E$ be a zero-mean noise matrix. For a `treatment' matrix $Z$ with entries in $\{0,1\}$ we observe the matrix $O$ with entries $O_{ij} := M^*_{ij} + E_{ij} + \mathcal{T}_{ij} Z_{ij}$ where $\mathcal{T}_{ij} $ are unknown, heterogenous treatment effects. The problem requires we estimate the average…

利用机器学习推断处理特定生存曲线AI 解读

In the absence of data from a randomized trial, researchers often aim to use observational data to draw causal inference about the effect of a treatment on a time-to-event outcome. In this context, interest often focuses on the treatment-specific survival curves; that is, the survival curves were the entire population under study to be assigned to receive the treatment or not. Under certain causal conditions, including that all confounders of the treatment-outcome…

政策约束下最优动态处理分配规则的估计AI 解读

Many policies involve dynamics in their treatment assignments, where individuals receive sequential interventions over multiple stages. We study estimation of an optimal dynamic treatment regime that guides the optimal treatment assignment for each individual at each stage based on their history. We propose an empirical welfare maximization approach in this dynamic framework, which estimates the optimal dynamic treatment regime using data from an experimental or…

高维非参数因果结构学习AI 解读

The PC and FCI algorithms are popular constraint-based methods for learning the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) in the absence and presence of latent and selection variables, respectively. These algorithms (and their order-independent variants, PC-stable and FCI-stable) have been shown to be consistent for learning sparse high-dimensional DAGs based on partial correlations. However, inferring conditional independences from partial correlations is valid if the…

逆概率加权估计的自适应归一化AI 解读

Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is a general tool in survey sampling and causal inference, used both in Horvitz-Thompson estimators, which normalize by the sample size, and Hájek/self-normalized estimators, which normalize by the sum of the inverse probability weights. In this work we study a family of IPW estimators, first proposed by Trotter and Tukey in the context of Monte Carlo problems, that are normalized by an affine combination of these two terms. We show how…

有能力共同基金的筛选：依赖结构下的错误发现控制AI 解读

Selecting skilled mutual funds through the multiple testing framework has received increasing attention from finance researchers and statisticians. The intercept $α$ of Carhart four-factor model is commonly used to measure the true performance of mutual funds, and positive $α$'s are considered as skilled. We observe that the standardized OLS estimates of $α$'s across the funds possess strong dependence and nonnormality structures, indicating that the conventional multiple…

mbsts 包：R 中的多变量贝叶斯结构时间序列模型AI 解读

The multivariate Bayesian structural time series (MBSTS) model is a general machine learning model that deals with inference and prediction for multiple correlated time series, where one also has the choice of using a different candidate pool of contemporaneous predictors for each target series. The MBSTS model has wide applications and is ideal for feature selection, time series forecasting, nowcasting, inferring causal impact, and others. This paper demonstrates how to use…

情境信息在最优臂识别中的作用AI 解读

We study the best-arm identification problem with fixed confidence when contextual (covariate) information is available in stochastic bandits. Although we can use contextual information in each round, we are interested in the marginalized mean reward over the contextual distribution. Our goal is to identify the best arm with a minimal number of samplings under a given value of the error rate. We show the instance-specific sample complexity lower bounds for the problem. Then,…

具有演化谱的时间序列变点分析AI 解读

This paper develops change-point methods for the spectrum of a locally stationary time series. We focus on series with a bounded spectral density that change smoothly under the null hypothesis but exhibits change-points or becomes less smooth under the alternative. We address two local problems. The first is the detection of discontinuities (or breaks) in the spectrum at unknown dates and frequencies. The second involves abrupt yet continuous changes in the spectrum over a…

回归不连续设计中的异质性处理效应发现AI 解读

The paper proposes a causal supervised machine learning algorithm to uncover treatment effect heterogeneity in sharp and fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) designs. We develop a criterion for building an honest ``regression discontinuity tree'', where each leaf contains the RD estimate of a treatment conditional on the values of some pre-treatment covariates. It is a priori unknown which covariates are relevant for capturing treatment effect heterogeneity, and it is the…