每日简报

以反事实方式比较可拒绝预测的分类器AI 解读

Abstaining classifiers have the option to abstain from making predictions on inputs that they are unsure about. These classifiers are becoming increasingly popular in high-stakes decision-making problems, as they can withhold uncertain predictions to improve their reliability and safety. When evaluating black-box abstaining classifier(s), however, we lack a principled approach that accounts for what the classifier would have predicted on its abstentions. These missing…

干预概率分布的公理化AI 解读

Causal intervention is an essential tool in causal inference. It is axiomatized under the rules of do-calculus in the case of structure causal models. We provide simple axiomatizations for families of probability distributions to be different types of interventional distributions. Our axiomatizations neatly lead to a simple and clear theory of causality that has several advantages: it does not need to make use of any modeling assumptions such as those imposed by structural…

混杂部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程的策略梯度方法AI 解读

In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result to non-parametrically estimate any history-dependent policy gradient under POMDPs using the offline data. The identification enables us to solve a sequence of conditional moment restrictions and adopt the min-max learning procedure with…

利用代理变量从低频采样时间序列发现因果结构AI 解读

Inferring causal structures from time series data is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. A major barrier to such inference is the problem of subsampling, i.e., the frequency of measurement is much lower than that of causal influence. To overcome this problem, numerous methods have been proposed, yet either was limited to the linear case or failed to achieve identifiability. In this paper, we propose a constraint-based algorithm that can identify the entire…

断点的设计：从断点回归到最优分区AI 解读

Discontinuities can be fairly arbitrary but also cause a significant impact on outcomes in larger systems. Indeed, their arbitrariness is why they have been used to infer causal relationships among variables in numerous settings. Regression discontinuity from econometrics assumes the existence of a discontinuous variable that splits the population into distinct partitions to estimate the causal effects of a given phenomenon. Here we consider the design of partitions for a…

通过代理变量条件独立检验进行因果发现AI 解读

Distinguishing causal connections from correlations is important in many scenarios. However, the presence of unobserved variables, such as the latent confounder, can introduce bias in conditional independence testing commonly employed in constraint-based causal discovery for identifying causal relations. To address this issue, existing methods introduced proxy variables to adjust for the bias caused by unobserveness. However, these methods were either limited to categorical…

利用距离秩的信息不平衡推断高维动态过程的因果关系AI 解读

We introduce an approach which allows detecting causal relationships between variables for which the time evolution is available. Causality is assessed by a variational scheme based on the Information Imbalance of distance ranks, a statistical test capable of inferring the relative information content of different distance measures. We test whether the predictability of a putative driven system Y can be improved by incorporating information from a potential driver system X,…

因果排序的置信集合AI 解读

Causal discovery procedures aim to deduce causal relationships among variables in a multivariate dataset. While various methods have been proposed for estimating a single causal model or a single equivalence class of models, less attention has been given to quantifying uncertainty in causal discovery in terms of confidence statements. A primary challenge in causal discovery of directed acyclic graphs is determining a causal ordering among the variables, and our work offers a…

依赖情境的异质性偏好：对 Barseghyan 与 Molinari（2023）的评论AI 解读

Barseghyan and Molinari (2023) give sufficient conditions for semi-nonparametric point identification of parameters of interest in a mixture model of decision-making under risk, allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in utility functions and limited consideration. A key assumption in the model is that the heterogeneity of risk preferences is unobservable but context-independent. In this comment, we build on their insights and present identification results in a setting where…

一般回归误差假设下无岭最小二乘估计量的预测与估计风险AI 解读

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in research focusing on minimum $\ell_2$ norm (ridgeless) interpolation least squares estimators. However, the majority of these analyses have been limited to an unrealistic regression error structure, assuming independent and identically distributed errors with zero mean and common variance. In this paper, we explore prediction risk as well as estimation risk under more general regression error assumptions, highlighting…

联邦离线策略学习AI 解读

We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample upper bounds on distinguishing notions of global regret for all data sources on aggregate and of local regret for any given data source. We characterize these regret bounds by expressions of source heterogeneity and distribution shift.…

使用静态工具变量识别动态局部平均处理效应AI 解读

In many situations, researchers are interested in identifying dynamic effects of an irreversible treatment with a time-invariant binary instrumental variable (IV). For example, in evaluations of dynamic effects of training programs with a single lottery determining eligibility. A common approach in these situations is to report per-period IV estimates. Under a dynamic extension of standard IV assumptions, we show that such IV estimands identify a weighted sum of treatment…

衰减随机缺失框架：部分标注数据中的模型双重稳健因果推断AI 解读

In modern large-scale observational studies, data collection constraints often result in partially labeled datasets, posing challenges for reliable causal inference, especially due to potential labeling bias and relatively small size of the labeled data. This paper introduces a decaying missing-at-random (decaying MAR) framework and associated approaches for doubly robust causal inference on treatment effects in such semi-supervised (SS) settings. This simultaneously…

随机权重矩阵与回归变量下空间自回归模型的拟得分匹配估计AI 解读

With the rapid advancements in technology for data collection, the application of the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model has become increasingly prevalent in real-world analysis, particularly when dealing with large datasets. However, the commonly used quasi-maximum likelihood estimation (QMLE) for the SAR model is not computationally scalable to handle the data with a large size. In addition, when establishing the asymptotic properties of the parameter estimators of the SAR…

二元结果随机实验精确置信区间的快速计算AI 解读

Given a randomized experiment with binary outcomes, exact confidence intervals for the average causal effect of the treatment can be computed through a series of permutation tests. This approach requires minimal assumptions and is valid for all sample sizes, as it does not rely on large-sample approximations such as those implied by the central limit theorem. We show that these confidence intervals can be found in $O(n \log n)$ permutation tests in the case of balanced…

双重差分中组别—时期条件平均处理效应的双重稳健一致置信带AI 解读

We consider a panel data analysis to examine the heterogeneity in treatment effects with respect to groups, periods, and a pre-treatment covariate of interest in the staggered difference-in-differences setting of Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021). Under standard identification conditions, a doubly robust estimand conditional on the covariate identifies the group-time conditional average treatment effect given the covariate. Focusing on the case of a continuous covariate, we…

平均处理效应的增广匹配加权估计量AI 解读

Propensity score matching (PSM) and augmented inverse propensity weighting (AIPW) are widely used in observational studies to estimate causal effects. The two approaches present complementary features. The AIPW estimator is doubly robust and locally efficient but can be unstable when the propensity scores are close to zero or one due to weighting by the inverse of the propensity score. On the other hand, PSM circumvents the instability of propensity score weighting but it…

多维异质性动态非线性面板的去偏推断AI 解读

We introduce a generic class of dynamic nonlinear heterogeneous parameter models that incorporate individual and time fixed effects in both the intercept and slope. These models are subject to the incidental parameter problem, in that the limiting distribution of the point estimator is not centered at zero, and that test statistics do not follow their standard asymptotic distributions as in the absence of the fixed effects. To address the problem, we develop an analytical…

缺失数据模型的贝叶斯敏感性分析AI 解读

In causal inference, sensitivity analysis is important to assess the robustness of study conclusions to key assumptions. We perform sensitivity analysis of the assumption that missing outcomes are missing completely at random. We follow a Bayesian approach, which is nonparametric for the outcome distribution and can be combined with an informative prior on the sensitivity parameter. We give insight in the posterior and provide theoretical guarantees in the form of…

用于因果效应估计的迁移学习AI 解读

We present a Transfer Causal Learning (TCL) framework when target and source domains share the same covariate/feature spaces, aiming to improve causal effect estimation accuracy in limited data. Limited data is very common in medical applications, where some rare medical conditions, such as sepsis, are of interest. Our proposed method, named \texttt{$\ell_1$-TCL}, incorporates $\ell_1$ regularized TL for nuisance models (e.g., propensity score model); the TL estimator of the…

异质地点间因果效应的迁移估计AI 解读

We consider the problem of extrapolating treatment effects across heterogeneous populations (``sites"/``contexts"). We consider an idealized scenario in which the researcher observes cross-sectional data for a large number of units across several ``experimental" sites in which an intervention has already been implemented to a new ``target" site for which a baseline survey of unit-specific, pre-treatment outcomes and relevant attributes is available. Our approach treats the…

协变量和结果缺失时随机临床试验的协变量调整AI 解读

When analyzing data from randomized clinical trials, covariate adjustment can be used to account for chance imbalance in baseline covariates and to increase precision of the treatment effect estimate. A practical barrier to covariate adjustment is the presence of missing data. In this paper, in the light of recent theoretical advancement, we first review several covariate adjustment methods with incomplete covariate data. We investigate the implications of the missing data…

重叠衰减与随机缺失标注选择偏差下的双重稳健半监督均值推断AI 解读

Semi-supervised (SS) inference has received much attention in recent years. Apart from a moderate-sized labeled data, L, the SS setting is characterized by an additional, much larger sized, unlabeled data, U. The setting of |U| >> |L|, makes SS inference unique and different from the standard missing data problems, owing to natural violation of the so-called "positivity" or "overlap" assumption. However, most of the SS literature implicitly assumes L and U to be equally…

通过变分因果推理提升目标条件强化学习的泛化能力AI 解读

As a pivotal component to attaining generalizable solutions in human intelligence, reasoning provides great potential for reinforcement learning (RL) agents' generalization towards varied goals by summarizing part-to-whole arguments and discovering cause-and-effect relations. However, how to discover and represent causalities remains a huge gap that hinders the development of causal RL. In this paper, we augment Goal-Conditioned RL (GCRL) with Causal Graph (CG), a structure…