每日简报

多弱工具变量下多变量孟德尔随机化的无偏估计与有效渐近推断AI 解读

Mendelian randomization (MR) is an instrumental variable (IV) approach to infer causal relationships between exposures and outcomes with genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary data. However, the multivariable inverse-variance weighting (IVW) approach, which serves as the foundation for most MR approaches, cannot yield unbiased causal effect estimates in the presence of many weak IVs. To address this problem, we proposed the MR using Bias-corrected Estimating Equation…

具有多个接收者的关系事件潜变量模型AI 解读

Directional relational event data, such as email data, often contain unicast messages (i.e., messages of one sender towards one receiver) and multicast messages (i.e., messages of one sender towards multiple receivers). The Enron email data that is the focus in this paper consists of 31% multicast messages. Multicast messages contain important information about the roles of actors in the network, which is needed for better understanding social interaction dynamics. In this…

重叠权重、匹配权重与熵权重：究竟在估计什么？AI 解读

There has been a recent surge in statistical methods for handling the lack of adequate positivity when using inverse probability weights (IPW). However, these nascent developments have raised a number of questions. Thus, we demonstrate the ability of equipoise estimators (overlap, matching, and entropy weights) to handle the lack of positivity. Compared to IPW, the equipoise estimators have been shown to be flexible and easy to interpret. However, promoting their wide use…

边际结构分位数模型的双重稳健估计与敏感性分析AI 解读

The marginal structure quantile model (MSQM) provides a unique lens to understand the causal effect of a time-varying treatment on the full distribution of potential outcomes. Under the semiparametric framework, we derive the efficiency influence function for the MSQM, from which a new doubly robust estimator is proposed for point estimation and inference. We show that the doubly robust estimator is consistent if either of the models associated with treatment assignment or…

利用干预数据进行联邦因果发现AI 解读

Causal discovery serves a pivotal role in mitigating model uncertainty through recovering the underlying causal mechanisms among variables. In many practical domains, such as healthcare, access to the data gathered by individual entities is limited, primarily for privacy and regulatory constraints. However, the majority of existing causal discovery methods require the data to be available in a centralized location. In response, researchers have introduced federated causal…

受损数据下的因果推断：测量误差、缺失、离散化与差分隐私AI 解读

The US Census Bureau will deliberately corrupt data sets derived from the 2020 US Census, enhancing the privacy of respondents while potentially reducing the precision of economic analysis. To investigate whether this trade-off is inevitable, we formulate a semiparametric model of causal inference with high dimensional corrupted data. We propose a procedure for data cleaning, estimation, and inference with data cleaning-adjusted confidence intervals. We prove consistency and…

causalAssembly：生成用于因果发现基准评估的真实感生产数据AI 解读

Algorithms for causal discovery have recently undergone rapid advances and increasingly draw on flexible nonparametric methods to process complex data. With these advances comes a need for adequate empirical validation of the causal relationships learned by different algorithms. However, for most real data sources true causal relations remain unknown. This issue is further compounded by privacy concerns surrounding the release of suitable high-quality data. To help address…

借助独立成分分析理解高斯线性时不变系统的干预可识别性AI 解读

We investigate the relationship between system identification and intervention design in dynamical systems. While previous research demonstrated how identifiable representation learning methods, such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA), can reveal cause-effect relationships, it relied on a passive perspective without considering how to collect data. Our work shows that in Gaussian Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems, the system parameters can be identified by introducing…

厘清整群随机试验中的估计目标AI 解读

Estimands can help clarify the interpretation of treatment effects and ensure that estimators are aligned to the study's objectives. Cluster randomised trials require additional attributes to be defined within the estimand compared to individually randomised trials, including whether treatment effects are marginal or cluster specific, and whether they are participant or cluster average. In this paper, we provide formal definitions of estimands encompassing both these…

早期疫苗试验中个体处理效应的随机化推断AI 解读

Randomization inference is a powerful tool in early phase vaccine trials when estimating the causal effect of a regimen against a placebo or another regimen. Randomization-based inference often focuses on testing either Fisher's sharp null hypothesis of no treatment effect for any participant or Neyman's weak null hypothesis of no sample average treatment effect. Many recent efforts have explored conducting exact randomization-based inference for other summaries of the…

采用加性混合先验的贝叶斯预后协变量调整AI 解读

Effective and rapid decision-making from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) requires unbiased and precise treatment effect inferences. Two strategies to address this requirement are to adjust for covariates that are highly correlated with the outcome, and to leverage historical control information via Bayes' theorem. We propose a new Bayesian prognostic covariate adjustment methodology, referred to as Bayesian PROCOVA, that combines these two strategies. Covariate…

异质性处理效应估计中 R-Learning 与逆方差加权的联系AI 解读

Many methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) can be expressed as weighted pseudo-outcome regressions (PORs). Previous comparisons of POR techniques have paid careful attention to the choice of pseudo-outcome transformation. However, we argue that the dominant driver of performance is actually the choice of weights. For example, we point out that R-Learning implicitly performs a POR with inverse-variance weights (IVWs). In the CATE setting, IVWs…

从一般环境学习因果表征：可识别性与内在歧义AI 解读

We study causal representation learning, the task of recovering high-level latent variables and their causal relationships in the form of a causal graph from low-level observed data (such as text and images), assuming access to observations generated from multiple environments. Prior results on the identifiability of causal representations typically assume access to single-node interventions which is rather unrealistic in practice, since the latent variables are unknown in…

保护隐私的自适应实验设计AI 解读

Adaptive experiment is widely adopted to estimate conditional average treatment effect (CATE) in clinical trials and many other scenarios. While the primary goal in experiment is to maximize estimation accuracy, due to the imperative of social welfare, it's also crucial to provide treatment with superior outcomes to patients, which is measured by regret in contextual bandit framework. These two objectives often lead to contrast optimal allocation mechanism. Furthermore,…

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…

贝叶斯网络估计倾向得分时二元数据因果效应的检验AI 解读

This paper proposes a new statistical approach for assessing treatment effect using Bayesian Networks (BNs). The goal is to draw causal inferences from observational data with a binary outcome and discrete covariates. The BNs are here used to estimate the propensity score, which enables flexible modeling and ensures maximum likelihood properties, including asymptotic efficiency. %As a result, other available approaches cannot perform better. When the propensity score is…

多终点整群随机试验中整体处理效应的秩估计AI 解读

Cluster randomization trials commonly employ multiple endpoints. When a single summary of treatment effects across endpoints is of primary interest, global hypothesis testing/effect estimation methods represent a common analysis strategy. However, specification of the joint distribution required by these methods is non-trivial, particularly when endpoint properties differ. We develop rank-based interval estimators for a global treatment effect referred to as the "global win…

潜在节点与结构化噪声下网络动态系统的因果结构学习AI 解读

This paper considers learning the hidden causal network of a linear networked dynamical system (NDS) from the time series data at some of its nodes -- partial observability. The dynamics of the NDS are driven by colored noise that generates spurious associations across pairs of nodes, rendering the problem much harder. To address the challenge of noise correlation and partial observability, we assign to each pair of nodes a feature vector computed from the time series data…

生存分析中使用合成控制的警示AI 解读

Synthetic control (SC) methods have gained rapid popularity in economics recently, where they have been applied in the context of inferring the effects of treatments on standard continuous outcomes assuming linear input-output relations. In medical applications, conversely, survival outcomes are often of primary interest, a setup in which both commonly assumed data-generating processes (DGPs) and target parameters are different. In this paper, we therefore investigate…

利用核 Stein 差异估计反事实密度AI 解读

Causal effects are usually studied in terms of the means of counterfactual distributions, which may be insufficient in many scenarios. Given a class of densities known up to normalizing constants, we propose to model counterfactual distributions by minimizing kernel Stein discrepancies in a doubly robust manner. This enables the estimation of counterfactuals over large classes of distributions while exploiting the desired double robustness. We present a theoretical analysis…

通过逆协方差矩阵的稀疏分解学习大型因果结构AI 解读

Learning causal structures from observational data is a fundamental problem facing important computational challenges when the number of variables is large. In the context of linear structural equation models (SEMs), this paper focuses on learning causal structures from the inverse covariance matrix. The proposed method, called ICID for Independence-preserving Decomposition from Inverse Covariance matrix, is based on continuous optimization of a matrix decomposition model…

选择模型与置换不变性：差异化产品市场的需求估计AI 解读

Choice modeling is at the core of understanding how changes to the competitive landscape affect consumer choices and reshape market equilibria. In this paper, we propose a fundamental characterization of choice functions that encompasses a wide variety of extant choice models. We demonstrate how non-parametric estimators like neural nets can easily approximate such functionals and overcome the curse of dimensionality that is inherent in the non-parametric estimation of…

存在治疗不依从时构造最优策略的敏感性分析AI 解读

The current body of research on developing optimal treatment strategies often places emphasis on intention-to-treat analyses, which fail to take into account the compliance behavior of individuals. Methods based on instrumental variables have been developed to determine optimal treatment strategies in the presence of endogeneity. However, these existing methods are not applicable when there are two active treatment options and the average causal effects of the treatments…

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…