每日简报

网络引力模型：整合最大熵与计量经济学方法AI 解读

The World Trade Web (WTW) is the network of international trade relationships among world countries. Characterizing both the local link weights (observed trade volumes) and the global network structure (large-scale topology) of the WTW via a single model is still an open issue. While the traditional Gravity Model (GM) successfully replicates the observed trade volumes by employing macroeconomic properties such as GDP and geographic distance, it, unfortunately, predicts a…

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…

因果推断的拓扑视角AI 解读

This paper presents a topological learning-theoretic perspective on causal inference by introducing a series of topologies defined on general spaces of structural causal models (SCMs). As an illustration of the framework we prove a topological causal hierarchy theorem, showing that substantive assumption-free causal inference is possible only in a meager set of SCMs. Thanks to a known correspondence between open sets in the weak topology and statistically verifiable…

具有连续共同主要终点的集群随机试验功效分析AI 解读

Pragmatic trials evaluating health care interventions often adopt cluster randomization due to scientific or logistical considerations. Previous reviews have shown that co-primary endpoints are common in pragmatic trials but infrequently recognized in sample size or power calculations. While methods for power analysis based on $K$ ($K\geq 2$) binary co-primary endpoints are available for CRTs, to our knowledge, methods for continuous co-primary endpoints are not yet…

同伴群体误设下同伴效应的识别：数据缺失与群体不确定性AI 解读

We consider identification of peer effects under peer group miss-specification. Two leading cases are missing data and peer group uncertainty. Missing data can take the form of some individuals being entirely absent from the data. The researcher need not have any information on missing individuals and need not even know that they are missing. We show that peer effects are nevertheless identifiable under mild restrictions on the probabilities of observing individuals, and…

具有高维协变量的断点回归设计推断AI 解读

We study regression discontinuity designs in which many predetermined covariates, possibly much more than the number of observations, can be used to increase the precision of treatment effect estimates. We consider a two-step estimator which first selects a small number of "important" covariates through a localized Lasso-type procedure, and then, in a second step, estimates the treatment effect by including the selected covariates linearly into the usual local linear…

多层级研究中更高效的双重稳健非参数处理效应估计量AI 解读

When studying treatment effects in multilevel studies, investigators commonly use (semi-)parametric estimators, which make strong parametric assumptions about the outcome, the treatment, and/or the correlation structure between study units in a cluster. We propose a novel estimator of treatment effects that does not make such assumptions. Specifically, the new estimator is shown to be doubly robust, asymptotically Normal, and often more efficient than existing estimators,…

用于因果推断的最优传输权重AI 解读

Imbalance in covariate distributions leads to biased estimates of causal effects. Weighting methods attempt to correct this imbalance but rely on specifying models for the treatment assignment mechanism, which is unknown in observational studies. This leaves researchers to choose the proper weighting method and the appropriate covariate functions for these models without knowing the correct combination to achieve distributional balance. In response to these difficulties, we…

稳健异质优势比：估计未购买商品的价格敏感性AI 解读

Problem definition: Mining for heterogeneous responses to an intervention is a crucial step for data-driven operations, for instance to personalize treatment or pricing. We investigate how to estimate price sensitivity from transaction-level data. In causal inference terms, we estimate heterogeneous treatment effects when (a) the response to treatment (here, whether a customer buys a product) is binary, and (b) treatment assignments are partially observed (here, full…

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…

利用半参数模型优化动态定价策略AI 解读

In this paper, we study the contextual dynamic pricing problem where the market value of a product is linear in its observed features plus some market noise. Products are sold one at a time, and only a binary response indicating success or failure of a sale is observed. Our model setting is similar to Javanmard and Nazerzadeh [2019] except that we expand the demand curve to a semiparametric model and need to learn dynamically both parametric and nonparametric components. We…