每日简报

Pocock–Simon 协变量自适应随机化下生存终点检验的有效性AI 解读

In the presence of prognostic covariates, inference about the treatment effect with time-to-event endpoints is mostly conducted via the stratified log-rank test or the score test based on the Cox proportional hazards model. In their ground-breaking work Ye and Shao (2020) have demonstrated theoretically that when the model is misspecified, the robust score test (Wei and Lin, 1989) as well as the unstratified log-rank test are conservative in trials with stratified…

含噪协变量下的部分识别：稳健优化方法AI 解读

Causal inference from observational datasets often relies on measuring and adjusting for covariates. In practice, measurements of the covariates can often be noisy and/or biased, or only measurements of their proxies may be available. Directly adjusting for these imperfect measurements of the covariates can lead to biased causal estimates. Moreover, without additional assumptions, the causal effects are not point-identifiable due to the noise in these measurements. To this…

交互固定效应面板模型中处理效应的置信区间AI 解读

We consider the construction of confidence intervals for treatment effects estimated using panel models with interactive fixed effects. We first use the factor-based matrix completion technique proposed by Bai and Ng (2021) to estimate the treatment effects, and then use bootstrap method to construct confidence intervals of the treatment effects for treated units at each post-treatment period. Our construction of confidence intervals requires neither specific distributional…

随机与观测研究中因果风险率比的敏感性分析AI 解读

The Hazard Ratio (HR) is often reported as the main causal effect when studying survival data. Despite its popularity, the HR suffers from an unclear causal interpretation. As already pointed out in the literature, there is a built-in selection bias in the HR, because similarly to the truncation by death problem, the HR conditions on post-treatment survival. A recently proposed alternative, inspired by the Survivor Average Causal Effect (SACE), is the causal HR, defined as…

后验预测倾向得分与 p 值AI 解读

\citet{Rosenbaum83ps} introduced the notion of the propensity score and discussed its central role in causal inference with observational studies. Their paper, however, caused a fundamental incoherence with an early paper by \citet{Rubin78}, which showed that the propensity score does not play any role in the Bayesian analysis of unconfounded observational studies if the priors on the propensity score and outcome models are independent. Despite the serious efforts made in…

用监督机器学习开展观察性科学的因果发现AI 解读

Causal inference can estimate causal effects, but unless data are collected experimentally, statistical analyses must rely on pre-specified causal models. Causal discovery algorithms are empirical methods for constructing such causal models from data. Several asymptotically correct methods already exist, but they generally struggle on smaller samples. Moreover, most methods focus on very sparse causal models, which may not always be a realistic representation of real-life…

多项 Probit 模型的快速变分贝叶斯方法AI 解读

The multinomial probit model is often used to analyze choice behaviour. However, estimation with existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is computationally costly, which limits its applicability to large choice data sets. This paper proposes a variational Bayes method that is accurate and fast, even when a large number of choice alternatives and observations are considered. Variational methods usually require an analytical expression for the unnormalized posterior…

簇级有向无环图中的因果效应识别AI 解读

Reasoning about the effect of interventions and counterfactuals is a fundamental task found throughout the data sciences. A collection of principles, algorithms, and tools has been developed for performing such tasks in the last decades (Pearl, 2000). One of the pervasive requirements found throughout this literature is the articulation of assumptions, which commonly appear in the form of causal diagrams. Despite the power of this approach, there are significant settings…

高维设定下的分布反事实分析AI 解读

In the context of treatment effect estimation, this paper proposes a new methodology to recover the counterfactual distribution when there is a single (or a few) treated unit and possibly a high-dimensional number of potential controls observed in a panel structure. The methodology accommodates, albeit does not require, the number of units to be larger than the number of time periods (high-dimensional setup). As opposed to modeling only the conditional mean, we propose to…

多变量中间区间随机化设计AI 解读

In a tie-breaker design (TBD), subjects with high values of a running variable are given some (usually desirable) treatment, subjects with low values are not, and subjects in the middle are randomized. TBDs are intermediate between regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) and randomized controlled trials (RCTs). TBDs allow a tradeoff between the resource allocation efficiency of an RDD and the statistical efficiency of an RCT. We study a model where the expected response is…

因果学习算法的评价方法与指标AI 解读

The convenient access to copious multi-faceted data has encouraged machine learning researchers to reconsider correlation-based learning and embrace the opportunity of causality-based learning, i.e., causal machine learning (causal learning). Recent years have therefore witnessed great effort in developing causal learning algorithms aiming to help AI achieve human-level intelligence. Due to the lack-of ground-truth data, one of the biggest challenges in current causal…

附加因素分配机制未知时的处理与对照研究因果推断AI 解读

Consider a situation with two treatments, the first of which is randomized but the second is not, and the multifactor version of this. Interest is in treatment effects, defined using standard factorial notation. We define estimators for the treatment effects and explore their properties when there is information about the nonrandomized treatment assignment and when there is no information on the assignment of the nonrandomized treatment. We show when and how hidden…

多重处理与聚类生存结局的灵活因果推断方法AI 解读

When drawing causal inferences about the effects of multiple treatments on clustered survival outcomes using observational data, we need to address implications of the multilevel data structure, multiple treatments, censoring and unmeasured confounding for causal analyses. Few off-the-shelf causal inference tools are available to simultaneously tackle these issues. We develop a flexible random-intercept accelerated failure time model, in which we use Bayesian additive…

基于 Copula 熵条件独立检验的因果域适应AI 解读

Domain Adaptation (DA) is a typical problem in machine learning that aims to transfer the model trained on source domain to target domain with different distribution. Causal DA is a special case of DA that solves the problem from the view of causality. It embeds the probabilistic relationships in multiple domains in a larger causal structure network of a system and tries to find the causal source (or intervention) on the system as the reason of distribution drifts of the…

个体化处理效应估计的集成方法AI 解读

In many medical and business applications, researchers are interested in estimating individualized treatment effects using data from a randomized experiment. For example in medical applications, doctors learn the treatment effects from clinical trials and in technology companies, researchers learn them from A/B testing experiments. Although dozens of machine learning models have been proposed for this task, it is challenging to determine which model will be best for the…

稀疏加权时变网络的得分驱动广义适应度模型AI 解读

While the vast majority of the literature on models for temporal networks focuses on binary graphs, often one can associate a weight to each link. In such cases the data are better described by a weighted, or valued, network. An important well known fact is that real world weighted networks are typically sparse. We propose a novel time varying parameter model for sparse and weighted temporal networks as a combination of the fitness model, appropriately extended, and the…

个性化补贴规则AI 解读

Subsidies are commonly used to encourage behaviors that can lead to short- or long-term benefits. Typical examples include subsidized job training programs and provisions of preventive health products, in which both behavioral responses and associated gains can exhibit heterogeneity. This study uses the marginal treatment effect (MTE) framework to study personalized assignments of subsidies based on individual characteristics. First, we derive the optimality condition for a…

利用似然比评分序贯学习因果图的拓扑排序AI 解读

Causal discovery, the learning of causality in a data mining scenario, has been of strong scientific and theoretical interest as a starting point to identify "what causes what?" Contingent on assumptions and a proper learning algorithm, it is sometimes possible to identify and accurately estimate a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG), as opposed to a Markov equivalence class of graphs that gives ambiguity of causal directions. The focus of this paper is in highlighting the…

不变性祖先搜索AI 解读

Recently, methods have been proposed that exploit the invariance of prediction models with respect to changing environments to infer subsets of the causal parents of a response variable. If the environments influence only few of the underlying mechanisms, the subset identified by invariant causal prediction (ICP), for example, may be small, or even empty. We introduce the concept of minimal invariance and propose invariant ancestry search (IAS). In its population version,…

观察性比较效果研究中的工具变量、混杂调整与双重差分三角验证AI 解读

Observational studies can play a useful role in assessing the comparative effectiveness of competing treatments. In a clinical trial the randomization of participants to treatment and control groups generally results in well-balanced groups with respect to possible confounders, which makes the analysis straightforward. However, when analysing observational data, the potential for unmeasured confounding makes comparing treatment effects much more challenging. Causal inference…

药物相互作用的稳健因果推断AI 解读

There is growing interest in developing causal inference methods for multi-valued treatments with a focus on pairwise average treatment effects. Here we focus on a clinically important, yet less-studied estimand: causal drug-drug interactions (DDIs), which quantifies the degree to which the causal effect of drug A is altered by the presence versus the absence of drug B. Confounding adjustment when studying the effects of DDIs can be accomplished via inverse probability of…

变量消除、图约简与有效率的 g 公式AI 解读

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, it may happen that a subset of the variables are 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…

连续处理效应的非参数双重稳健检验AI 解读

The vast majority of literature on evaluating the significance of a treatment effect based on observational data has been confined to discrete treatments. These methods are not applicable to drawing inference for a continuous treatment, which arises in many important applications. To adjust for confounders when evaluating a continuous treatment, existing inference methods often rely on discretizing the treatment or using (possibly misspecified) parametric models for the…

结合支持集不重叠的观察数据与实验数据估计处理效应AI 解读

When estimating treatment effects, the golden standard is to conduct a randomized experiment and then contrast outcomes associated with the treatment group and the control group. However, in many cases, randomized experiments are either conducted with a much smaller scale compared to the size of the target population or accompanied with certain ethical issues and thus hard to implement. Therefore, researchers usually rely on observational data to study causal connections.…