每日简报

使用主观有序结果识别因果效应AI 解读

Survey questions often ask respondents to select from ordered scales where the meanings of the categories are subjective, leaving each individual free to apply their own definitions in answering. This paper studies the use of these responses as an outcome variable in causal inference, accounting for variation in interpretation of the categories across individuals. I find that when a continuous treatment variable is statistically independent of both i) potential outcomes; and…

因子模型的张量主成分分析AI 解读

Modern empirical analysis often relies on high-dimensional panel datasets with non-negligible cross-sectional and time-series correlations. Factor models are natural for capturing such dependencies. A tensor factor model describes the $d$-dimensional panel as a sum of a reduced rank component and an idiosyncratic noise, generalizing traditional factor models for two-dimensional panels. We consider a tensor factor model corresponding to the notion of a reduced multilinear…

极端 ℓp 块聚簇推断的渐近分析AI 解读

Extremes occur in stationary regularly varying time series as short periods with several large observations, known as extremal blocks. We study cluster statistics summarizing the behavior of functions acting on these extremal blocks. Examples of cluster statistics are the extremal index, cluster size probabilities, and other cluster indices. The purpose of our work is twofold. First, we state the asymptotic normality of block estimators for cluster inference based on…

利用偏相关的未观测混杂优化敏感性分析AI 解读

Causal inference necessarily relies upon untestable assumptions; hence, it is crucial to assess the robustness of obtained results to violations of identification assumptions. However, such sensitivity analysis is only occasionally undertaken in practice, as many existing methods require analytically tractable solutions and their results are often difficult to interpret. We take a more flexible approach to sensitivity analysis and view it as a constrained stochastic…

随机波动率管理组合的灵活变分近似AI 解读

This paper investigates volatility-managed portfolios through a variational Bayes approach that smooths stochastic volatility forecasts. Our algorithm exhibits competitive performance relative to established methods both in terms of inferential accuracy and computational efficiency. Analyzing equity factors and characteristic-based portfolios, we show that smoothing reduces excess leverage and turnover, significantly improving risk-adjusted returns after transaction costs.…

预测表现驱动因素的度量：信用评分应用AI 解读

As they play an increasingly important role in determining access to credit, credit scoring models are under growing scrutiny from banking supervisors and internal model validators. These authorities need to monitor the model performance and identify its key drivers. To facilitate this, we introduce the XPER methodology to decompose a performance metric (e.g., AUC, $R^2$) into specific contributions associated with the various features of a forecasting model. XPER is…

未观测混杂下预测算法的稳健设计与评估AI 解读

Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings with selective labels: outcomes are observed only for units selected by past decision makers. This creates an identification problem under unobserved confounding -- when selected and unselected units differ in unobserved ways that affect outcomes. We propose a framework for robust design and evaluation of predictive algorithms that bounds how much outcomes may differ between selected and unselected units with…

一个工具变量统领全局：恰好识别工具变量估计的偏差与覆盖率AI 解读

We revisit the finite-sample behavior of single-variable just-identified instrumental variables (just-ID IV) estimators, arguing that in most microeconometric applications, the usual inference strategies are likely reliable. Three widely-cited applications are used to explain why this is so. We then consider pretesting strategies of the form $t_{1}>c$, where $t_{1}$ is the first-stage $t$-statistic, and the first-stage sign is given. Although pervasive in empirical practice,…

共形预测与无分布不确定性量化入门AI 解读

Black-box machine learning models are now routinely used in high-risk settings, like medical diagnostics, which demand uncertainty quantification to avoid consequential model failures. Conformal prediction is a user-friendly paradigm for creating statistically rigorous uncertainty sets/intervals for the predictions of such models. Critically, the sets are valid in a distribution-free sense: they possess explicit, non-asymptotic guarantees even without distributional…

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…

重尾变量与混杂因素的因果建模：河流流量应用AI 解读

Confounding variables are a recurrent challenge for causal discovery and inference. In many situations, complex causal mechanisms only manifest themselves in extreme events, or take simpler forms in the extremes. Stimulated by data on extreme river flows and precipitation, we introduce a new causal discovery methodology for heavy-tailed variables that allows the effect of a known potential confounder to be almost entirely removed when the variables have comparable tails, and…

DeepMed：利用去偏深度学习开展半参数因果中介分析AI 解读

Causal mediation analysis can unpack the black box of causality and is therefore a powerful tool for disentangling causal pathways in biomedical and social sciences, and also for evaluating machine learning fairness. To reduce bias for estimating Natural Direct and Indirect Effects in mediation analysis, we propose a new method called DeepMed that uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to cross-fit the infinite-dimensional nuisance functions in the efficient influence functions.…

协变量漂移下预测集的双重稳健校准AI 解读

Conformal prediction has received tremendous attention in recent years and has offered new solutions to problems in missing data and causal inference; yet these advances have not leveraged modern semiparametric efficiency theory for more robust and efficient uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we consider the problem of obtaining distribution-free prediction regions accounting for a shift in the distribution of the covariates between the training and test data. Under…

混合根与维度增长下的预测分位数回归：ALQR 方法AI 解读

In this paper we propose the adaptive lasso for predictive quantile regression (ALQR). Reflecting empirical findings, we allow predictors to have various degrees of persistence and exhibit different signal strengths. The number of predictors is allowed to grow with the sample size. We study regularity conditions under which stationary, local unit root, and cointegrated predictors are present simultaneously. We next show the convergence rates, model selection consistency, and…

新冠疫情后的通胀情绪分析AI 解读

We implement traditional machine learning and deep learning methods for global tweets from 2017-2022 to build a high-frequency measure of the public's sentiment index on inflation and analyze its correlation with other online data sources such as google trend and market-oriented inflation index. We use manually labeled trigrams to test the prediction performance of several machine learning models(logistic regression,random forest etc.) and choose Bert model for final…

弱依赖下高维动态面板异质处理效应的估计与推断AI 解读

This paper provides estimation and inference methods for a conditional average treatment effects (CATE) characterized by a high-dimensional parameter in both homogeneous cross-sectional and unit-heterogeneous dynamic panel data settings. In our leading example, we model CATE by interacting the base treatment variable with explanatory variables. The first step of our procedure is orthogonalization, where we partial out the controls and unit effects from the outcome and the…

合成控制法的预测变量选择AI 解读

Synthetic control methods often rely on matching pre-treatment characteristics (called predictors) of the treated unit. The choice of predictors and how they are weighted plays a key role in the performance and interpretability of synthetic control estimators. This paper proposes the use of a sparse synthetic control procedure that penalizes the number of predictors used in generating the counterfactual to select the most important predictors. We derive, in a linear factor…

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…

连接计量经济学与连续最大熵网络模型AI 解读

In the study of economic networks, econometric approaches interpret the traditional Gravity Model specification as the expected link weight coming from a probability distribution whose functional form can be chosen arbitrarily, while statistical-physics approaches construct maximum-entropy distributions of weighted graphs, constrained to satisfy a given set of measurable network properties. In a recent, companion paper, we integrated the two approaches and applied them to…

多元连续结局阶梯楔形设计的功效分析AI 解读

Multivariate outcomes are common in pragmatic cluster randomized trials. While sample size calculation procedures for multivariate outcomes exist under parallel assignment, none have been developed for a stepped wedge design. In this article, we present computationally efficient power and sample size procedures for stepped wedge cluster randomized trials (SW-CRTs) with multivariate outcomes that differentiate the within-period and between-period intracluster correlation…

通过最优标签置换分类进行类别数据的二元因果发现AI 解读

Causal discovery for quantitative data has been extensively studied but less is known for categorical data. We propose a novel causal model for categorical data based on a new classification model, termed classification with optimal label permutation (COLP). By design, COLP is a parsimonious classifier, which gives rise to a provably identifiable causal model. A simple learning algorithm via comparing likelihood functions of causal and anti-causal models suffices to learn…

用于贝叶斯学习的自然梯度准黑箱变分推断AI 解读

We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It applies within the class of exponential-family variational posterior distributions, for which we extensively discuss the Gaussian case for which the updates have a rather simple form. Our Quasi Black-box Variational Inference (QBVI)…

用于分析自由贸易协定决定因素的二元组双重去偏机器学习AI 解读

This paper presents novel methods and theories for estimation and inference about parameters in econometric models using machine learning for nuisance parameters estimation when data are dyadic. We propose a dyadic cross fitting method to remove over-fitting biases under arbitrary dyadic dependence. Together with the use of Neyman orthogonal scores, this novel cross fitting method enables root-$n$ consistent estimation and inference robustly against dyadic dependence. We…

基于机器学习的稳健价格敏感度估计及航空定价应用AI 解读

We consider the problem of dynamic pricing of a product in the presence of feature-dependent price sensitivity. Developing practical algorithms that can estimate price elasticities robustly, especially when information about no purchases (losses) is not available, to drive such automated pricing systems is a challenge faced by many industries. Based on the Poisson semi-parametric approach, we construct a flexible yet interpretable demand model where the price related part is…