每日简报

含隐藏变量因果图中最优调整集的充要图条件AI 解读

The problem of selecting optimal backdoor adjustment sets to estimate causal effects in graphical models with hidden and conditioned variables is addressed. Previous work has defined optimality as achieving the smallest asymptotic estimation variance and derived an optimal set for the case without hidden variables. For the case with hidden variables there can be settings where no optimal set exists and currently only a sufficient graphical optimality criterion of limited…

结合外部观测数据识别与估计临床试验长期处理效应AI 解读

In biomedical studies, estimating drug effects on chronic diseases requires a long follow-up period, which is difficult to meet in randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The use of a short-term surrogate to replace the long-term outcome for assessing the drug effect relies on stringent assumptions that empirical studies often fail to satisfy. Motivated by a kidney disease study, we investigate the drug effects on long-term outcomes by combining an RCT without observation of…

理解异质性处理效应估计中的模型选择困境AI 解读

Personalized treatment effect estimates are often of interest in high-stakes applications -- thus, before deploying a model estimating such effects in practice, one needs to be sure that the best candidate from the ever-growing machine learning toolbox for this task was chosen. Unfortunately, due to the absence of counterfactual information in practice, it is usually not possible to rely on standard validation metrics for doing so, leading to a well-known model selection…

面板数据模型的高阶展开与推断AI 解读

In this paper, we propose a simple inferential method for a wide class of panel data models with a focus on such cases that have both serial correlation and cross-sectional dependence. In order to establish an asymptotic theory to support the inferential method, we develop some new and useful higher-order expansions, such as Berry-Esseen bound and Edgeworth Expansion, under a set of simple and general conditions. We further demonstrate the usefulness of these theoretical…

DeCAMFounder：隐藏变量下的非线性因果发现AI 解读

Many real-world decision-making tasks require learning causal relationships between a set of variables. Traditional causal discovery methods, however, require that all variables are observed, which is often not feasible in practical scenarios. Without additional assumptions about the unobserved variables, it is not possible to recover any causal relationships from observational data. Fortunately, in many applied settings, additional structure among the confounders can be…

大型贝叶斯向量自回归的变分推断AI 解读

We propose a novel variational Bayes approach to estimate high-dimensional vector autoregression (VAR) models with hierarchical shrinkage priors. Our approach does not rely on a conventional structural VAR representation of the parameter space for posterior inference. Instead, we elicit hierarchical shrinkage priors directly on the matrix of regression coefficients so that (1) the prior structure directly maps into posterior inference on the reduced-form transition matrix,…

状态空间模型的高效变分近似AI 解读

Variational Bayes methods are a potential scalable estimation approach for state space models. However, existing methods are inaccurate or computationally infeasible for many state space models. This paper proposes a variational approximation that is accurate and fast for any model with a closed-form measurement density function and a state transition distribution within the exponential family of distributions. We show that our method can accurately and quickly estimate a…

没有显著星号是好消息：基于协变量平衡检验 p 值的再随机化AI 解读

Modern social and biomedical scientific publications require the reporting of covariate balance tables with not only covariate means by treatment group but also the associated $p$-values from significance tests of their differences. The practical need to avoid small $p$-values renders balance check and rerandomization by hypothesis testing standards an attractive tool for improving covariate balance in randomized experiments. Despite the intuitiveness of such practice and…

基于 U 统计量与依赖野生自助法的函数时间序列稳健变点检测AI 解读

The aim of this paper is to develop a change-point test for functional time series that uses the full functional information and is less sensitive to outliers compared to the classical CUSUM test. For this aim, the Wilcoxon two-sample test is generalized to functional data. To obtain the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic, we proof a limit theorem for a process of $U$-statistics with values in a Hilbert space under weak dependence. Critical values can be obtained…

异质性处理效应的因果保序校准AI 解读

We propose causal isotonic calibration, a novel nonparametric method for calibrating predictors of heterogeneous treatment effects. Furthermore, we introduce cross-calibration, a data-efficient variant of calibration that eliminates the need for hold-out calibration sets. Cross-calibration leverages cross-fitted predictors and generates a single calibrated predictor using all available data. Under weak conditions that do not assume monotonicity, we establish that both causal…

条件分布局部线性回归估计的一致收敛结果AI 解读

This paper examines the local linear regression (LLR) estimate of the conditional distribution function $F(y|x)$. We derive three uniform convergence results: the uniform bias expansion, the uniform convergence rate, and the uniform asymptotic linear representation. The uniformity in the above results is with respect to both $x$ and $y$ and therefore has not previously been addressed in the literature on local polynomial regression. Such uniform convergence results are…

基于Cornish–Fisher展开的条件方差、偏度与峰度分位数估计AI 解读

The conditional variance, skewness, and kurtosis play a central role in time series analysis. These three conditional moments (CMs) are often studied by some parametric models but with two big issues: the risk of model mis-specification and the instability of model estimation. To avoid the above two issues, this paper proposes a novel method to estimate these three CMs by the so-called quantiled CMs (QCMs). The QCM method first adopts the idea of Cornish-Fisher expansion to…

高维数据的渐近分布无关独立性检验AI 解读

Test of independence is of fundamental importance in modern data analysis, with broad applications in variable selection, graphical models, and causal inference. When the data is high dimensional and the potential dependence signal is sparse, independence testing becomes very challenging without distributional or structural assumptions. In this paper, we propose a general framework for independence testing by first fitting a classifier that distinguishes the joint and…

将处理效应推广和迁移至目标总体的一步加权AI 解读

The problem of generalization and transportation of treatment effect estimates from a study sample to a target population is central to empirical research and statistical methodology. In both randomized experiments and observational studies, weighting methods are often used with this objective. Traditional methods construct the weights by separately modeling the treatment assignment and study selection probabilities and then multiplying functions (e.g., inverses) of their…

用于干预后密度估计的归一化流AI 解读

Existing machine learning methods for causal inference usually estimate quantities expressed via the mean of potential outcomes (e.g., average treatment effect). However, such quantities do not capture the full information about the distribution of potential outcomes. In this work, we estimate the density of potential outcomes after interventions from observational data. For this, we propose a novel, fully-parametric deep learning method called Interventional Normalizing…

RobustIV 与 controlfunctionIV：可能无效工具变量下的因果推断软件AI 解读

We present R software packages RobustIV and controlfunctionIV for causal inference with possibly invalid instrumental variables. RobustIV focuses on the linear outcome model. It implements the two-stage hard thresholding method to select valid instrumental variables from a set of candidate instrumental variables and make inferences for the causal effect in both low- and high-dimensional settings. Furthermore, RobustIV implements the high-dimensional endogeneity test and the…

异质因果图中的异质性处理效应AI 解读

Heterogeneity and comorbidity are two interwoven challenges associated with various healthcare problems that greatly hampered research on developing effective treatment and understanding of the underlying neurobiological mechanism. Very few studies have been conducted to investigate heterogeneous causal effects (HCEs) in graphical contexts due to the lack of statistical methods. To characterize this heterogeneity, we first conceptualize heterogeneous causal graphs (HCGs) by…

存在网络溢出的线性成对数据模型推断AI 解读

When using dyadic data (i.e., data indexed by pairs of units), researchers typically assume a linear model, estimate it using Ordinary Least Squares and conduct inference using ``dyadic-robust" variance estimators. The latter assumes that dyads are uncorrelated if they do not share a common unit (e.g., if the same individual is not present in both pairs of data). We show that this assumption does not hold in many empirical applications because indirect links may exist due to…

用于因果推断的变量重要性匹配AI 解读

Our goal is to produce methods for observational causal inference that are auditable, easy to troubleshoot, accurate for treatment effect estimation, and scalable to high-dimensional data. We describe a general framework called Model-to-Match that achieves these goals by (i) learning a distance metric via outcome modeling, (ii) creating matched groups using the distance metric, and (iii) using the matched groups to estimate treatment effects. Model-to-Match uses variable…

金融多重检验中的序贯柯西组合检验AI 解读

We introduce a simple tool to control for false discoveries and identify individual signals in scenarios involving many tests, dependent test statistics, and potentially sparse signals. The tool applies the Cauchy combination test recursively on a sequence of expanding subsets of $p$-values and is referred to as the sequential Cauchy combination test. While the original Cauchy combination test aims to make a global statement about a set of null hypotheses by summing…

分治动态规划：高维变点检测的近线性时间方法AI 解读

We develop a novel, general and computationally efficient framework, called Divide and Conquer Dynamic Programming (DCDP), for localizing change points in time series data with high-dimensional features. DCDP deploys a class of greedy algorithms that are applicable to a broad variety of high-dimensional statistical models and can enjoy almost linear computational complexity. We investigate the performance of DCDP in three commonly studied change point settings in high…

可微分的多目标因果贝叶斯实验设计AI 解读

We introduce a gradient-based approach for the problem of Bayesian optimal experimental design to learn causal models in a batch setting -- a critical component for causal discovery from finite data where interventions can be costly or risky. Existing methods rely on greedy approximations to construct a batch of experiments while using black-box methods to optimize over a single target-state pair to intervene with. In this work, we completely dispose of the black-box…

用于工具变量回归的深度偏最小二乘法AI 解读

In this paper, we propose deep partial least squares for the estimation of high-dimensional nonlinear instrumental variable regression. As a precursor to a flexible deep neural network architecture, our methodology uses partial least squares for dimension reduction and feature selection from the set of instruments and covariates. A central theoretical result, due to Brillinger (2012) shows that the feature selection provided by partial least squares is consistent and the…

面板正态有限混合回归模型的成分数量检验AI 解读

This paper develops the likelihood ratio-based test of the null hypothesis of a M0-component model against an alternative of (M0 + 1)-component model in the normal mixture panel regression by extending the Expectation-Maximization (EM) test of Chen and Li (2009a) and Kasahara and Shimotsu (2015) to the case of panel data. We show that, unlike the cross-sectional normal mixture, the first-order derivative of the density function for the variance parameter in the panel normal…