每日简报

考虑激励的合成控制：通过激励探索准确估计反事实AI 解读

Synthetic control methods (SCMs) are a canonical approach used to estimate treatment effects from panel data in the internet economy. We shed light on a frequently overlooked but ubiquitous assumption made in SCMs of "overlap": a treated unit can be written as some combination -- typically, convex or linear -- of the units that remain under control. We show that if units select their own interventions, and there is sufficiently large heterogeneity between units that prefer…

通过噪声正则化实现经济预测中的良性过拟合AI 解读

This paper studies linear overparameterized models in economic forecasting and highlights that including noise variables (regressors with no predictive power) regularizes the estimator. We consider a setting where both the outcome variable and the high-dimensional predictors are driven by a small number of latent factors, and show that the linear forecast model is dense rather than sparse. It turns out that a ridgeless regression augmented with noise predictors attains the…

混合矩阵值自回归模型AI 解读

Time series of matrix-valued data are increasingly available in various areas including economics, finance, social science, among others. These data may shed light on the inter-dynamical relationships between two sets of attributes, for instance, countries and economic indices. The matrix autoregressive (MAR) model provides a parsimonious approach for analyzing such data. However, the MAR model, being a linear model with parametric constraints, cannot capture the nonlinear…

前门模型下因果效应的灵活非参数推断AI 解读

Evaluating causal treatment effects in observational studies requires addressing confounding. While the back-door criterion enables identification through adjustment for observed covariates, it fails in the presence of unmeasured confounding. The front-door criterion offers an alternative by leveraging variables that fully mediate the treatment effect and are unaffected by unmeasured confounders of the treatment-outcome pair. We develop novel one-step and targeted minimum…

非确定性因果规律下因果推理的公理化AI 解读

We investigate the generalization of causal models to the case of indeterministic causal laws that was suggested in Halpern (2000). We give an overview of what differences in modeling are enforced by this more general perspective, and propose an implementation of generalized models in the style of the causal team semantics of Barbero & Sandu (2020). In these models, the laws are not represented by functions (as in the deterministic case), but more generally by relations. We…

基于广义协方差的综合序列相关检验AI 解读

We study nonlinear serial dependence tests for non-Gaussian time series and residuals of dynamic models based on portmanteau statistics involving nonlinear autocovariances. A new test with an asymptotic $χ^2$ distribution is introduced for testing nonlinear serial dependence (NLSD) in time series. This test is inspired by the Generalized Covariance (GCov) residual-based specification test, recently proposed as a diagnostic tool for semi-parametric dynamic models with i.i.d.…

函数型时间序列共同趋势的统计推断AI 解读

We study statistical inference on unit roots and cointegration for time series in a Hilbert space. We develop statistical inference on the number of common stochastic trends embedded in the time series, i.e., the dimension of the nonstationary subspace. We also consider tests of hypotheses on the nonstationary and stationary subspaces themselves. The Hilbert space can be of an arbitrarily large dimension, and our methods remain asymptotically valid even when the time series…

一般线性约束多元时间序列的点预测与概率预测协调AI 解读

Forecast reconciliation is the post-forecasting process aimed to revise a set of incoherent base forecasts into coherent forecasts in line with given data structures. Most of the point and probabilistic regression-based forecast reconciliation results ground on the so called "structural representation" and on the related unconstrained generalized least squares reconciliation formula. However, the structural representation naturally applies to genuine hierarchical/grouped…

非线性网络自回归AI 解读

We study general nonlinear models for time series networks of integer and continuous valued data. The vector of high dimensional responses, measured on the nodes of a known network, is regressed non-linearly on its lagged value and on lagged values of the neighboring nodes by employing a smooth link function. We study stability conditions for such multivariate process and develop quasi maximum likelihood inference when the network dimension is increasing. In addition, we…

因果中介分析的解耦表示AI 解读

Estimating direct and indirect causal effects from observational data is crucial to understanding the causal mechanisms and predicting the behaviour under different interventions. Causal mediation analysis is a method that is often used to reveal direct and indirect effects. Deep learning shows promise in mediation analysis, but the current methods only assume latent confounders that affect treatment, mediator and outcome simultaneously, and fail to identify different types…

PromptCast：基于提示的时间序列预测范式AI 解读

This paper presents a new perspective on time series forecasting. In existing time series forecasting methods, the models take a sequence of numerical values as input and yield numerical values as output. The existing SOTA models are largely based on the Transformer architecture, modified with multiple encoding mechanisms to incorporate the context and semantics around the historical data. Inspired by the successes of pre-trained language foundation models, we pose a…

森林型异质性处理效应估计为何有效？AI 解读

Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) is of prime importance in many disciplines, ranging from personalized medicine to economics among many others. Random forests have been shown to be a flexible and powerful approach to HTE estimation in both randomized trials and observational studies. In particular "causal forests", introduced by Athey, Tibshirani and Wager (2019), along with the R implementation in package grf were rapidly adopted. A related approach,…

时间序列预测：利用分数差分保留长期依赖AI 解读

This study introduces a novel forecasting strategy that leverages the power of fractional differencing (FD) to capture both short- and long-term dependencies in time series data. Unlike traditional integer differencing methods, FD preserves memory in series while stabilizing it for modeling purposes. By applying FD to financial data from the SPY index and incorporating sentiment analysis from news reports, this empirical analysis explores the effectiveness of FD in…

因子模型结构变化的似然比检验AI 解读

A factor model with a break in its factor loadings is observationally equivalent to a model without changes in the loadings but a change in the variance of its factors. This effectively transforms a structural change problem of high dimension into a problem of low dimension. This paper considers the likelihood ratio (LR) test for a variance change in the estimated factors. The LR test implicitly explores a special feature of the estimated factors: the pre-break and…

动态固定效应 Logit 模型的转移概率与矩条件AI 解读

Dynamic logit models are popular tools in economics to measure state dependence. This paper introduces a new method to derive moment restrictions in a large class of such models with strictly exogenous regressors and fixed effects. We exploit the common structure of logit-type transition probabilities and elementary properties of rational fractions, to formulate a systematic procedure that scales naturally with model complexity (e.g the lag order or the number of observed…

面向政策学习的公平且稳健的异质处理效应估计AI 解读

We propose a simple and general framework for nonparametric estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects under fairness constraints. Under standard regularity conditions, we show that the resulting estimators possess the double robustness property. We use this framework to characterize the trade-off between fairness and the maximum welfare achievable by the optimal policy. We evaluate the methods in a simulation study and illustrate them in a real-world case study.

异质性因果效应估计的极小极大收敛速率AI 解读

Estimation of heterogeneous causal effects - i.e., how effects of policies and treatments vary across subjects - is a fundamental task in causal inference. Many methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) have been proposed in recent years, but questions surrounding optimality have remained largely unanswered. In particular, a minimax theory of optimality has yet to be developed, with the minimax rate of convergence and construction of rate-optimal…

不可观测因素选择下合成控制法的大样本性质AI 解读

We analyze the synthetic control (SC) method in panel data settings with many units. We assume the treatment assignment is based on unobserved heterogeneity and pre-treatment information, allowing for both strictly and sequentially exogenous assignment processes. We show that the critical property that determines the behavior of the SC method is the ability of input features to approximate the unobserved heterogeneity. Our results imply that the SC method delivers…

允许时间效应序列相关的双向聚类标准误AI 解读

We propose improved standard errors and an asymptotic distribution theory for two-way clustered panels. Our proposed estimator and theory allow for arbitrary serial dependence in the common time effects, which is excluded by existing two-way methods, including the popular two-way cluster standard errors of Cameron, Gelbach, and Miller (2011) and the cluster bootstrap of Menzel (2021). Our asymptotic distribution theory is the first which allows for this level of…

BayesDAG：面向因果发现的梯度后验推断AI 解读

Bayesian causal discovery aims to infer the posterior distribution over causal models from observed data, quantifying epistemic uncertainty and benefiting downstream tasks. However, computational challenges arise due to joint inference over combinatorial space of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and nonlinear functions. Despite recent progress towards efficient posterior inference over DAGs, existing methods are either limited to variational inference on node permutation…

函数型工具变量回归及移民对本地工资影响的估计AI 解读

Functional linear regression gets its popularity as a statistical tool to study the relationship between function-valued response and exogenous explanatory variables. However, in practice, it is hard to expect that the explanatory variables of interest are perfectly exogenous, due to, for example, the presence of omitted variables and measurement error. Despite its empirical relevance, it was not until recently that this issue of endogeneity was studied in the literature on…

内生样本选择下的分布回归及英国工资分解AI 解读

We develop a distribution regression model under endogenous sample selection. This model is a semi-parametric generalization of the Heckman selection model. It accommodates much richer effects of the covariates on outcome distribution and patterns of heterogeneity in the selection process, and allows for drastic departures from the Gaussian error structure, while maintaining the same level tractability as the classical model. The model applies to continuous, discrete and…

因果归一化流：从理论到实践AI 解读

In this work, we deepen on the use of normalizing flows for causal reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage recent results on non-linear ICA to show that causal models are identifiable from observational data given a causal ordering, and thus can be recovered using autoregressive normalizing flows (NFs). Second, we analyze different design and learning choices for causal normalizing flows to capture the underlying causal data-generating process. Third, we describe how to…

不依赖维度选择的变点检测AI 解读

Change point testing for high-dimensional data has attracted a lot of attention in statistics and machine learning owing to the emergence of high-dimensional data with structural breaks from many fields. In practice, when the dimension is less than the sample size but is not small, it is often unclear whether a method that is tailored to high-dimensional data or simply a classical method that is developed and justified for low-dimensional data is preferred. In addition, the…