每日简报

多元连续空气污染暴露研究中考虑人口流动的空间干扰方法AI 解读

We develop new methodology to improve our understanding of the causal effects of multivariate air pollution exposures on public health accounting for mobility. Typically, in environmental health studies, exposure to air pollution for an individual is assigned based on their residential address, though many people spend time in different regions with potentially different levels of air pollution. To account for this, we incorporate estimates of the mobility of individuals…

利用动态对照匹配验证大规模并行自适应测试AI 解读

A/B testing is a widely-used paradigm within marketing optimization because it promises identification of causal effects and because it is implemented out of the box in most messaging delivery software platforms. Modern businesses, however, often run many A/B/n tests at the same time and in parallel, and package many content variations into the same messages, not all of which are part of an explicit test. Whether as the result of many teams testing at the same time, or as…

利用阶段变量发现健康时间序列中的因果关系AI 解读

Using observational data to learn causal relationships is essential when randomized experiments are not possible, such as in healthcare. Discovering causal relationships in time-series health data is even more challenging when relationships change over the course of a disease, such as medications that are most effective early on or for individuals with severe disease. Stage variables such as weeks of pregnancy, disease stages, or biomarkers like HbA1c, can influence what…

存在处理后混杂变量时因果中介分析的贝叶斯非参数方法AI 解读

We propose a new Bayesian non-parametric (BNP) method for estimating the causal effects of mediation in the presence of a post-treatment confounder. We specify an enriched Dirichlet process mixture (EDPM) to model the joint distribution of the observed data (outcome, mediator, post-treatment confounders, treatment, and baseline confounders). The proposed BNP model allows more confounder-based clusters than clusters for the outcome and mediator. For identifiability, we use…

SECRETS：利用合成干预提高随机临床试验的受试者效率AI 解读

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) of a medical intervention but requires 100s-1000s of subjects, making it expensive and difficult to implement. While a cross-over trial can reduce sample size requirements by measuring the treatment effect per individual, it is only applicable to chronic conditions and interventions whose effects dissipate rapidly. Another approach is to replace or augment data…

不可忽略结局缺失与未测混杂下的因果推断AI 解读

Observational studies are the primary source of data for causal inference, but it is challenging when existing unmeasured confounding. Missing data problems are also common in observational studies. How to obtain the causal effects from the nonignorable missing data with unmeasured confounding is a challenge. In this paper, we consider that how to obtain complier average causal effect with unmeasured confounding from the nonignorable missing outcomes. We propose an auxiliary…

因果路线图在两项安全监测案例中的应用：电子病历协变量调整与结局预测AI 解读

Real-world data, such as administrative claims and electronic health records, are increasingly used for safety monitoring and to help guide regulatory decision-making. In these settings, it is important to document analytic decisions transparently and objectively to ensure that analyses meet their intended goals. The Causal Roadmap is an established framework that can guide and document analytic decisions through each step of the analytic pipeline, which will help…

利用部分恢复的未测空间混杂变量改进双重稳健估计AI 解读

Studies in environmental and epidemiological sciences are often spatially varying and observational in nature with the aim of establishing cause and effect relationships. One of the major challenges with such studies is the presence of unmeasured spatial confounders. 'spatial confounding' is the phenomenon in which the spatial residuals are correlated to the spatial covariates in the model, when unaccounted for it can lead to biased causal effect estimates. This paper…

Myerson 正则性约束下的 Grenander 型密度估计AI 解读

This study presents a novel approach to the density estimation of private values from second-price auctions, diverging from the conventional use of smoothing-based estimators. We introduce a Grenander-type estimator, constructed based on a shape restriction in the form of a convexity constraint. This constraint corresponds to the renowned Myerson regularity condition in auction theory, which is equivalent to the concavity of the revenue function for selling the auction item.…

动态条件分位数处理效应的评估及网约车应用AI 解读

Many modern tech companies, such as Google, Uber, and Didi, utilize online experiments (also known as A/B testing) to evaluate new policies against existing ones. While most studies concentrate on average treatment effects, situations with skewed and heavy-tailed outcome distributions may benefit from alternative criteria, such as quantiles. However, assessing dynamic quantile treatment effects (QTE) remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with data from ride-sourcing…

有序结果下观察性研究与不完全随机试验获益指标的尖锐非参数界AI 解读

The probability of benefit is a valuable and important measure of treatment effect, which has advantages over the average treatment effect. Particularly for an ordinal outcome, it has a better interpretation and can make apparent different aspects of the treatment impact. Unfortunately, this measure, and variations of it, are not identifiable even in randomized trials with perfect compliance. There is, for this reason, a long literature on nonparametric bounds for…

离散控制变量下处理效应估计中的真实与估计倾向得分AI 解读

The finite sample variance of an inverse propensity weighted estimator is derived in the case of discrete control variables with finite support. The obtained expressions generally corroborate widely-cited asymptotic theory showing that estimated propensity scores are superior to true propensity scores in the context of inverse propensity weighting. However, similar analysis of a modified estimator demonstrates that foreknowledge of the true propensity function can confer a…

物理教育观察研究中的统计因果推断方法入门AI 解读

Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer", this paper discusses some of the fundamental issues underlying statistical causal inference. In reviewing these issues, we discuss well-established causal inference methods commonly applied in other fields and discuss their application to…

利用贝叶斯非参数依赖混合模型估计限制平均生存时间AI 解读

Restricted mean survival time (RMST) is an intuitive summary statistic for time-to-event random variables, and can be used for measuring treatment effects. Compared to hazard ratio, its estimation procedure is robust against the non-proportional hazards assumption. We propose nonparametric Bayeisan (BNP) estimators for RMST using a dependent stick-breaking process prior mixture model that adjusts for mixed-type covariates. The proposed Bayesian estimators can yield both…

面向纵向神经影像分析的高维响应增长曲线模型AI 解读

There is increasing interest in modeling high-dimensional longitudinal outcomes in applications such as developmental neuroimaging research. Growth curve model offers a useful tool to capture both the mean growth pattern across individuals, as well as the dynamic changes of outcomes over time within each individual. However, when the number of outcomes is large, it becomes challenging and often infeasible to tackle the large covariance matrix of the random effects involved…

将二元因果推断方法扩展至多变量因果发现的新框架AI 解读

We focus on the extension of bivariate causal learning methods into multivariate problem settings in a systematic manner via a novel framework. It is purposive to augment the scale to which bivariate causal discovery approaches can be applied since contrast to traditional causal discovery methods, bivariate methods render estimation in the form of a causal Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of its complete partial directed acyclic graphs (CPDAGs). To tackle the problem, an…

因果效应估计中的有效协变量调整选择AI 解读

In order to achieve unbiased and efficient estimators of causal effects from observational data, covariate selection for confounding adjustment becomes an important task in causal inference. Despite recent advancements in graphical criterion for constructing valid and efficient adjustment sets, these methods often rely on assumptions that may not hold in practice. We examine the properties of existing graph-free covariate selection methods with respect to both validity and…

通过单调三角输运映射学习因果图AI 解读

We study the problem of causal structure learning from data using optimal transport (OT). Specifically, we first provide a constraint-based method which builds upon lower-triangular monotone parametric transport maps to design conditional independence tests which are agnostic to the noise distribution. We provide an algorithm for causal discovery up to Markov Equivalence with no assumptions on the structural equations/noise distributions, which allows for settings with…

疗效与不良反应随剂量弱增时，如何利用有限试验证据选择剂量AI 解读

In medical treatment and elsewhere, it has become standard to base treatment intensity (dosage) on evidence in randomized trials. Yet it has been rare to study how outcomes vary with dosage. In trials to obtain drug approval, the norm has been to specify some dose of a new drug and compare it with an established therapy or placebo. Design-based trial analysis views each trial arm as qualitatively different, but it may be highly credible to assume that efficacy and adverse…

结合约束模型与 PMIME 度量的时间序列因果发现AI 解读

Causality defines the relationship between cause and effect. In multivariate time series field, this notion allows to characterize the links between several time series considering temporal lags. These phenomena are particularly important in medicine to analyze the effect of a drug for example, in manufacturing to detect the causes of an anomaly in a complex system or in social sciences... Most of the time, studying these complex systems is made through correlation only. But…

面板数据模型中的深度神经网络估计AI 解读

In this paper we study neural networks and their approximating power in panel data models. We provide asymptotic guarantees on deep feed-forward neural network estimation of the conditional mean, building on the work of Farrell et al. (2021), and explore latent patterns in the cross-section. We use the proposed estimators to forecast the progression of new COVID-19 cases across the G7 countries during the pandemic. We find significant forecasting gains over both linear panel…

保序回归中的子群选择AI 解读

Given a sample of covariate-response pairs, we consider the subgroup selection problem of identifying a subset of the covariate domain where the regression function exceeds a pre-determined threshold. We introduce a computationally-feasible approach for subgroup selection in the context of multivariate isotonic regression based on martingale tests and multiple testing procedures for logically-structured hypotheses. Our proposed procedure satisfies a non-asymptotic, uniform…

利用实验分阶段推出建模干扰效应AI 解读

Experiments on online marketplaces and social networks suffer from interference, where the outcome of a unit is impacted by the treatment status of other units. We propose a framework for modeling interference using a ubiquitous deployment mechanism for experiments, staggered roll-out designs, which slowly increase the fraction of units exposed to the treatment to mitigate any unanticipated adverse side effects. Our main idea is to leverage the temporal variations in…

GNAR-edge：时变边权网络的自回归模型AI 解读

In economic and financial applications, there is often the need for analysing multivariate time series, comprising of time series for a range of quantities. In some applications such complex systems can be associated with some underlying network describing pairwise relationships among the quantities. Accounting for the underlying network structure for the analysis of this type of multivariate time series is required for assessing estimation error and can be particularly…