每日简报

含随机波动率与多重时变权重的贝叶斯空间自回归模型AI 解读

A novel spatial autoregressive model for panel data is introduced, which incorporates multilayer networks and accounts for time-varying relationships. Moreover, the proposed approach allows the structural variance to evolve smoothly over time and enables the analysis of shock propagation in terms of time-varying spillover effects. The framework is applied to analyse the dynamics of international relationships among the G7 economies and their impact on stock market returns…

Meek 分隔集及其在目标导向因果发现中的应用AI 解读

Learning causal structures from interventional data is a fundamental problem with broad applications across various fields. While many previous works have focused on recovering the entire causal graph, in practice, there are scenarios where learning only part of the causal graph suffices. This is called $targeted$ causal discovery. In our work, we focus on two such well-motivated problems: subset search and causal matching. We aim to minimize the number of interventions in…

PAM-HC：利用外部数据构建随机临床试验混合对照的贝叶斯非参数方法AI 解读

It is highly desirable to borrow information from external data to augment a control arm in a randomized clinical trial, especially in settings where the sample size for the control arm is limited. However, a main challenge in borrowing information from external data is to accommodate potential heterogeneous subpopulations across the external and trial data. We apply a Bayesian nonparametric model called Plaid Atoms Model (PAM) to identify overlapping and unique…

Text-Transport：自然语言因果效应的跨域迁移AI 解读

As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand how changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the causal effect of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g., sentiment) on a reader's response to the text. In this paper, we introduce Text-Transport, a method for estimation of causal effects from natural language under any text distribution. Current approaches for valid causal effect estimation require…

匹配数量随样本增长的倾向得分匹配AI 解读

This paper reexamines Abadie and Imbens (2016)'s work on propensity score matching for average treatment effect estimation. We explore the asymptotic behavior of these estimators when the number of nearest neighbors, $M$, grows with the sample size. It is shown, hardly surprising but technically nontrivial, that the modified estimators can improve upon the original fixed-$M$ estimators in terms of efficiency. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential to attain the…

加权平均处理效应中稳健三明治方差估计的保守性评估AI 解读

In causal inference, the Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) estimator is commonly used to estimate causal effects for estimands within the class of Weighted Average Treatment Effect (WATE). When constructing confidence intervals (CIs), robust sandwich variance estimators are frequently used for practical reasons. Although these estimators are easy to calculate using widely-used statistical software, they often yield narrow CIs for commonly applied estimands, such as the…

带加性与乘性噪声的线性随机微分方程生成元识别AI 解读

In this paper, we present conditions for identifying the generator of a linear stochastic differential equation (SDE) from the distribution of its solution process with a given fixed initial state. These identifiability conditions are crucial in causal inference using linear SDEs as they enable the identification of the post-intervention distributions from its observational distribution. Specifically, we derive a sufficient and necessary condition for identifying the…

用迁移反事实学习评估电力服务不公平AI 解读

Energy justice is a growing area of interest in interdisciplinary energy research. However, identifying systematic biases in the energy sector remains challenging due to confounding variables, intricate heterogeneity in counterfactual effects, and limited data availability. First, this paper demonstrates how one can evaluate counterfactual unfairness in a power system by analyzing the average causal effect of a specific protected attribute. Subsequently, we use subgroup…

潜在稀疏异质性下的面板模型贝叶斯估计AI 解读

We incorporate a version of a spike and slab prior, comprising a pointmass at zero ("spike") and a Normal distribution around zero ("slab") into a dynamic panel data framework to model coefficient heterogeneity. In addition to homogeneity and full heterogeneity, our specification can also capture sparse heterogeneity, that is, there is a core group of units that share common parameters and a set of deviators with idiosyncratic parameters. We fit a model with unobserved…

利用离散工具变量双重稳健识别连续处理的因果效应AI 解读

Many empirical applications estimate causal effects of a continuous endogenous variable (treatment) using a binary instrument. Estimation is typically done through linear 2SLS. This approach requires a mean treatment change and causal interpretation requires the LATE-type monotonicity in the first stage. An alternative approach is to explore distributional changes in the treatment, where the first-stage restriction is treatment rank similarity. We propose causal estimands…

用于因果推断的调查校准：协变量分布平衡的简便方法AI 解读

This paper proposes a~simple, yet powerful, method for balancing distributions of covariates for causal inference based on observational studies. The method makes it possible to balance an arbitrary number of quantiles (e.g., medians, quartiles, or deciles) together with means if necessary. The proposed approach is based on the theory of calibration estimators (Deville and Särndal 1992), in particular, calibration estimators for quantiles, proposed by Harms and Duchesne…

评估非线性加性噪声模型的整体与局部因果设定正确性AI 解读

We propose a method to detect model misspecifications in nonlinear causal additive and potentially heteroscedastic noise models. We aim to identify predictor variables for which we can infer the causal effect even in cases of such misspecification. We develop a general framework based on knowledge of the multivariate observational data distribution. We then propose an algorithm for finite sample data, discuss its asymptotic properties, and illustrate its performance on…

用于生存因果效应的稳定高效协变量平衡估计量AI 解读

We propose an empirically stable and asymptotically efficient covariate-balancing approach to the problem of estimating survival causal effects in data with conditionally-independent censoring. This addresses a challenge often encountered in state-of-the-art nonparametric methods: the use of inverses of small estimated probabilities and the resulting amplification of estimation error. We validate our theoretical results in experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data.

部分识别离散响应模型的锐性与稳健估计AI 解读

Semiparametric discrete choice models are widely used in a variety of practical applications. While these models are point identified in the presence of continuous covariates, they can become partially identified when covariates are discrete. In this paper we find that classical estimators, including the maximum score estimator, (Manski (1975)), loose their attractive statistical properties without point identification. First of all, they are not sharp with the estimator…

通过分割实现暴露—结果对的多项式时间局部因果发现AI 解读

Causal discovery is crucial for causal inference in observational studies, as it can enable the identification of valid adjustment sets (VAS) for unbiased effect estimation. However, global causal discovery is notoriously hard in the nonparametric setting, with exponential time and sample complexity in the worst case. To address this, we propose local discovery by partitioning (LDP): a local causal discovery method that is tailored for downstream inference tasks without…

因果零假设检验的统计稳健性与因果稳健性AI 解读

Prior work applying semiparametric theory to causal inference has primarily focused on deriving estimators that exhibit statistical robustness under a prespecified causal model that permits identification of a desired causal parameter. However, a fundamental challenge is correct specification of such a model, which usually involves making untestable assumptions. Evidence factors is an approach to combining hypothesis tests of a common causal null hypothesis under two or more…

处理组自助法：量化匹配处理效应估计的不确定性AI 解读

This paper proposes a new non-parametric bootstrap method to quantify the uncertainty of average treatment effect estimate for the treated from matching estimators. More specifically, it seeks to quantify the uncertainty associated with the average treatment effect estimate for the treated by bootstrapping the treatment group only and finding the counterpart control group by pair matching on estimated propensity score without replacement. We demonstrate the validity of this…

用不完全竞争数据拒绝完全竞争假设的统计困难AI 解读

We theoretically prove why statistically rejecting the null hypothesis of perfect competition is challenging, known as a common problem in the literature. We also assess the finite sample performance of the conduct parameter test in homogeneous goods markets, showing that statistical power increases with the number of markets, a larger conduct parameter, and a stronger demand rotation instrument. However, even with a moderate number of markets and five firms, rejecting the…

矩阵值中介变量的贝叶斯联合中介分析模型AI 解读

Unscheduled treatment interruptions may lead to reduced quality of care in radiation therapy (RT). Identifying the RT prescription dose effects on the outcome of treatment interruptions, mediated through doses distributed into different organs-at-risk (OARs), can inform future treatment planning. The radiation exposure to OARs can be summarized by a matrix of dose-volume histograms (DVH) for each patient. Although various methods for high-dimensional mediation analysis have…

因果发现中的假设违反与得分匹配的稳健性AI 解读

When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical properties of their data. Because causal discovery without further assumptions is an ill-posed problem, each algorithm comes with its own set of usually untestable assumptions, some of which are hard to meet in real datasets. Motivated by these…

处理选择、均方遗憾与部分识别AI 解读

We consider a decision maker who faces a binary treatment choice when their welfare is only partially identified from data. We contribute to the literature by anchoring our finite-sample analysis on mean square regret, a decision criterion advocated by Kitagawa, Lee, and Qiu (2022). We find that optimal rules are always fractional, irrespective of the width of the identified set and precision of its estimate. The optimal treatment fraction is a simple logistic transformation…

组合商品选择的半参数离散选择模型AI 解读

We propose two approaches to estimate semiparametric discrete choice models for bundles. Our first approach is a kernel-weighted rank estimator based on a matching-based identification strategy. We establish its complete asymptotic properties and prove the validity of the nonparametric bootstrap for inference. We then introduce a new multi-index least absolute deviations (LAD) estimator as an alternative, of which the main advantage is its capacity to estimate preference…

利用加权能量距离估计修正处理政策效应AI 解读

The causal effects of continuous treatments are often characterized through the average dose response function, which is challenging to estimate from observational data due to confounding and positivity violations. Modified treatment policies (MTPs) are an alternative approach that aim to assess the effect of a modification to observed treatment values and work under relaxed assumptions. Estimators for MTPs generally focus on estimating the conditional density of treatment…

从时间序列因果图的抽象表示识别总效应AI 解读

We study the problem of identifiability of the total effect of an intervention from observational time series in the situation, common in practice, where one only has access to abstractions of the true causal graph. We consider here two abstractions: the extended summary causal graph, which conflates all lagged causal relations but distinguishes between lagged and instantaneous relations, and the summary causal graph which does not give any indication about the lag between…