每日简报

双重差分研究的新进展：近期计量文献综述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…

网约车行程的拼车行为：机器学习推断方法AI 解读

Ride-hailing is rapidly changing urban and personal transportation. Ride sharing or pooling is important to mitigate negative externalities of ride-hailing such as increased congestion and environmental impacts. However, there lacks empirical evidence on what affect trip-level sharing behavior in ride-hailing. Using a novel dataset from all ride-hailing trips in Chicago in 2019, we show that the willingness of riders to request a shared ride has monotonically decreased from…

利用机器学习检验联合分析中的因果假设AI 解读

Conjoint analysis is a popular experimental design used to measure multidimensional preferences. Researchers examine how varying a factor of interest, while controlling for other relevant factors, influences decision-making. Currently, there exist two methodological approaches to analyzing data from a conjoint experiment. The first focuses on estimating the average marginal effects of each factor while averaging over the other factors. Although this allows for…

高维处理的异质性因果效应估计：联合分析应用AI 解读

Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is an active area of research. Most of the existing methods, however, focus on estimating the conditional average treatment effects of a single, binary treatment given a set of pre-treatment covariates. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the heterogeneous causal effects of high-dimensional treatments, which poses unique challenges in terms of estimation and interpretation. The proposed approach finds maximally…

利用目标样本汇总信息进行因果推广的熵平衡AI 解读

In this paper, we focus on estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) of a target population when individual-level data from a source population and summary-level data (e.g., first or second moments of certain covariates) from the target population are available. In the presence of heterogeneous treatment effect, the ATE of the target population can be different from that of the source population when distributions of treatment effect modifiers are dissimilar in these two…

结合实验与观察数据识别和估计长期因果效应AI 解读

We study identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment variable on a long-term outcome using data from an observational and an experimental domain. The observational data are subject to unobserved confounding. Furthermore, subjects in the experiment are only followed for a short period; thus, long-term effects are unobserved, though short-term effects are available. Consequently, neither data source alone suffices for causal inference on the long-term outcome,…

内生且异质的总量需求模型中随机系数的非参数识别AI 解读

This paper studies nonparametric identification in market level demand models for differentiated products with heterogeneous consumers. We consider a general class of models that allows for the individual specific coefficients to vary continuously across the population and give conditions under which the density of these coefficients, and hence also functionals such as welfare measures, is identified. A key finding is that two leading models, the BLP-model (Berry, Levinsohn,…

半监督与高维环境下处理效应估计的一般框架AI 解读

In this article, we aim to provide a general and complete understanding of semi-supervised (SS) causal inference for treatment effects. Specifically, we consider two such estimands: (a) the average treatment effect and (b) the quantile treatment effect, as prototype cases, in an SS setting, characterized by two available data sets: (i) a labeled data set of size $n$, providing observations for a response and a set of high dimensional covariates, as well as a binary treatment…

异质性观测数据下的因果发现AI 解读

We consider the problem of causal discovery (structure learning) from heterogeneous observational data. Most existing methods assume a homogeneous sampling scheme, which leads to misleading conclusions when violated in many applications. To this end, we propose a novel approach that exploits data heterogeneity to infer possibly cyclic causal structures from causally insufficient systems. The core idea is to model the direct causal effects as functions of exogenous covariates…

模型误设下的因果推断：基于倾向得分的调整AI 解读

We study Bayesian approaches to causal inference via propensity score regression. Much of the Bayesian literature on propensity score methods have relied on approaches that cannot be viewed as fully Bayesian in the context of conventional `likelihood times prior' posterior inference; in addition, most methods rely on parametric and distributional assumptions, and presumed correct specification. We emphasize that causal inference is typically carried out in settings of…

允许时间效应序列相关的双向聚类标准误AI 解读

We propose improved standard errors and an asymptotic distribution theory for two-way clustered panels. Our proposed estimator and theory allow for arbitrary serial dependence in the common time effects, which is excluded by existing two-way methods, including the popular two-way cluster standard errors of Cameron, Gelbach, and Miller (2011) and the cluster bootstrap of Menzel (2021). Our asymptotic distribution theory is the first which allows for this level of…

通过改进精确搜索与较弱假设实现可靠因果发现AI 解读

Many of the causal discovery methods rely on the faithfulness assumption to guarantee asymptotic correctness. However, the assumption can be approximately violated in many ways, leading to sub-optimal solutions. Although there is a line of research in Bayesian network structure learning that focuses on weakening the assumption, such as exact search methods with well-defined score functions, they do not scale well to large graphs. In this work, we introduce several strategies…

各期处理均连续分布时的双重差分估计量AI 解读

When studying the effects of taxes, tariffs, or prices using panel data, the treatment is often continuously distributed in every period. We develop difference-in-differences (DID) estimators for such settings. We partition units into switchers, whose treatment changes between consecutive periods, and stayers, whose treatment remains constant. Under a parallel-trends assumption, we show that the slopes of switchers' potential outcomes with respect to the treatment are…

有序数据的因果结构发现AI 解读

Causal discovery for purely observational, categorical data is a long-standing challenging problem. Unlike continuous data, the vast majority of existing methods for categorical data focus on inferring the Markov equivalence class only, which leaves the direction of some causal relationships undetermined. This paper proposes an identifiable ordinal causal discovery method that exploits the ordinal information contained in many real-world applications to uniquely identify the…

广义线性因果网络的分布式学习AI 解读

We consider the task of learning causal structures from data stored on multiple machines, and propose a novel structure learning method called distributed annealing on regularized likelihood score (DARLS) to solve this problem. We model causal structures by a directed acyclic graph that is parameterized with generalized linear models, so that our method is applicable to various types of data. To obtain a high-scoring causal graph, DARLS simulates an annealing process to…

因果效应元学习器：交叉拟合的有限样本表现AI 解读

Estimation of causal effects using machine learning methods has become an active research field in econometrics. In this paper, we study the finite sample performance of meta-learners for estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects under the usage of sample-splitting and cross-fitting to reduce the overfitting bias. In both synthetic and semi-synthetic simulations we find that the performance of the meta-learners in finite samples greatly depends on the estimation…

利用方差信息进行面板数据群组结构估计的谱聚类AI 解读

Consider a panel data setting where repeated observations on individuals are available. Often it is reasonable to assume that there exist groups of individuals that share similar effects of observed characteristics, but the grouping is typically unknown in advance. We first conduct a local analysis which reveals that the variances of the individual coefficient estimates contain useful information for the estimation of group structure. We then propose a method to estimate…

残差非线性回归：时变处理与协变量下的因果估计AI 解读

Standard regression adjustment gives inconsistent estimates of causal effects when there are time-varying treatment effects and time-varying covariates. Loosely speaking, the issue is that some covariates are post-treatment variables because they may be affected by prior treatment status, and regressing out post-treatment variables causes bias. More precisely, the bias is due to certain non-confounding latent variables that create colliders in the causal graph. These latent…

长期剂量反应曲线的核方法AI 解读

A core challenge in causal inference is how to extrapolate long term effects, of possibly continuous actions, from short term experimental data. It arises in artificial intelligence: the long term consequences of continuous actions may be of interest, yet only short term rewards may be collected in exploration. For this estimand, called the long term dose response curve, we propose a simple nonparametric estimator based on kernel ridge regression. By embedding the…

应用于随机对照临床试验的自动因果推断AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered as the gold standard for testing causal hypotheses in the clinical domain. However, the investigation of prognostic variables of patient outcome in a hypothesized cause-effect route is not feasible using standard statistical methods. Here, we propose a new automated causal inference method (AutoCI) built upon the invariant causal prediction (ICP) framework for the causal re-interpretation of clinical trial data. Compared to…

多值处理效应的高维模型辅助推断AI 解读

Consider estimation of average treatment effects with multi-valued treatments using augmented inverse probability weighted (IPW) estimators, depending on outcome regression and propensity score models in high-dimensional settings. These regression models are often fitted by regularized likelihood-based estimation, while ignoring how the fitted functions are used in the subsequent inference about the treatment parameters. Such separate estimation can be associated with known…

固定效应模型的Bootstrap推断AI 解读

The maximum-likelihood estimator of nonlinear panel data models with fixed effects is consistent but asymptotically-biased under rectangular-array asymptotics. The literature has thus far concentrated its effort on devising methods to correct the maximum-likelihood estimator for its bias as a means to salvage standard inferential procedures. Instead, we show that the parametric bootstrap replicates the distribution of the (uncorrected) maximum-likelihood estimator in large…

BCDAG：高斯有向无环图的贝叶斯结构与因果学习R包AI 解读

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) provide a powerful framework to model causal relationships among variables in multivariate settings; in addition, through the do-calculus theory, they allow for the identification and estimation of causal effects between variables also from pure observational data. In this setting, the process of inferring the DAG structure from the data is referred to as causal structure learning or causal discovery. We introduce BCDAG, an R package for…

用于因果发现的最优传输方法AI 解读

To determine causal relationships between two variables, approaches based on Functional Causal Models (FCMs) have been proposed by properly restricting model classes; however, the performance is sensitive to the model assumptions, which makes it difficult to use. In this paper, we provide a novel dynamical-system view of FCMs and propose a new framework for identifying causal direction in the bivariate case. We first show the connection between FCMs and optimal transport,…