每日简报

条件平均处理效应推断的三重去偏 LassoAI 解读

This study investigates the estimation and the statistical inference about Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATEs), which have garnered attention as a metric representing individualized causal effects. In our data-generating process, we assume linear models for the outcomes associated with binary treatments and define the CATE as a difference between the expected outcomes of these linear models. This study allows the linear models to be high-dimensional, and our…

可选择协变量的主动自适应处理效应实验设计AI 解读

This study designs an adaptive experiment for efficiently estimating average treatment effects (ATEs). In each round of our adaptive experiment, an experimenter sequentially samples an experimental unit, assigns a treatment, and observes the corresponding outcome immediately. At the end of the experiment, the experimenter estimates an ATE using the gathered samples. The objective is to estimate the ATE with a smaller asymptotic variance. Existing studies have designed…

回归不连续设计的半参数推断AI 解读

Treatment effects in regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) are often estimated using local regression methods. \cite{Hahn:01} demonstrated that the identification of the average treatment effect at the cutoff in RDDs relies on the unconfoundedness assumption and that, without this assumption, only the local average treatment effect at the cutoff can be identified. In this paper, we propose a semiparametric framework tailored for identifying the average treatment effect in…

空间随机化设计如何改进政策评估AI 解读

This article studies the benefits of using spatially randomized experimental designs which partition the experimental area into distinct, non-overlapping units with treatments assigned randomly. Such designs offer improved policy evaluation in online experiments by providing more precise policy value estimators and more effective A/B testing algorithms than traditional global designs, which apply the same treatment across all units simultaneously. We examine both parametric…

测量误差下网络扩散估计的非稳健性AI 解读

Network diffusion models are used to study disease transmission, information spread, technology adoption, and other socio-economic processes. We show that estimates of these diffusions are highly non-robust to mismeasurement. First, even when the network is measured perfectly, small and local mismeasurement in the initial seed generates a large shift in the locations of the expected diffusion. Second, if instead the initial seed is known, even a vanishingly small share of…

断点回归设计实用导论：扩展篇AI 解读

This monograph, together with its accompanying first part Cattaneo, Idrobo and Titiunik (2020), collects and expands the instructional materials we prepared for more than $50$ short courses and workshops on Regression Discontinuity (RD) methodology that we taught between 2014 and 2023. In this second monograph, we discuss several topics in RD methodology that build on and extend the analysis of RD designs introduced in Cattaneo, Idrobo and Titiunik (2020). Our first goal is…

两样本汇总数据孟德尔随机化中的修正去偏逆方差加权估计AI 解读

Mendelian randomization uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to make causal inferences about the effects of modifiable risk factors on diseases from observational data. One of the major challenges in Mendelian randomization is that many genetic variants are only modestly or even weakly associated with the risk factor of interest, a setting known as many weak instruments. Many existing methods, such as the popular inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method, could be…

面向神经代码模型解释的因果理论AI 解读

Neural Language Models of Code, or Neural Code Models (NCMs), are rapidly progressing from research prototypes to commercial developer tools. As such, understanding the capabilities and limitations of such models is becoming critical. However, the abilities of these models are typically measured using automated metrics that often only reveal a portion of their real-world performance. While, in general, the performance of NCMs appears promising, currently much is unknown…

通过 Riesz 回归实现自动去偏机器学习AI 解读

A variety of interesting parameters may depend on high dimensional regressions. Machine learning can be used to estimate such parameters. However estimators based on machine learners can be severely biased by regularization and/or model selection. Debiased machine learning uses Neyman orthogonal estimating equations to reduce such biases. Debiased machine learning generally requires estimation of unknown Riesz representers. A primary innovation of this paper is to provide…

半竞争风险下的直接与间接处理效应AI 解读

Semi-competing risks refer to the phenomenon that the terminal event (such as death) can censor the non-terminal event (such as disease progression) but not vice versa. The treatment effect on the terminal event can be delivered either directly following the treatment or indirectly through the non-terminal event. We consider two strategies to decompose the total effect into a direct effect and an indirect effect under the framework of mediation analysis in completely…

用最优传输与非线性双重差分估计因果效应AI 解读

We propose a nonlinear difference-in-differences method to estimate multivariate counterfactual distributions in classical treatment and control study designs with observational data. Our approach sheds a new light on existing approaches like the changes-in-changes and the classical semiparametric difference-in-differences estimator and generalizes them to settings with multivariate heterogeneity in the outcomes. The main benefit of this extension is that it allows for…

带协变量的实体排序：极大似然估计的不确定性量化AI 解读

This paper concerns with statistical estimation and inference for the ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons with additional covariate information such as the attributes of the compared items. Despite extensive studies, few prior literatures investigate this problem under the more realistic setting where covariate information exists. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel model, Covariate-Assisted Ranking Estimation (CARE) model, that extends the well-known…

移动健康零膨胀计数结果的因果偏离效应：非参数估计方法AI 解读

In mobile health, tailoring interventions for real-time delivery is of paramount importance. Micro-randomized trials have emerged as the "gold-standard" methodology for developing such interventions. Analyzing data from these trials provides insights into the efficacy of interventions and the potential moderation by specific covariates. The "causal excursion effect", a novel class of causal estimand, addresses these inquiries. Yet, existing research mainly focuses on…

依从者与不依从者平均因果效应中主层可忽略性违反的敏感性分析AI 解读

An important strategy for identifying principal causal effects, which are often used in settings with noncompliance, is to invoke the principal ignorability (PI) assumption. As PI is untestable, it is important to gauge how sensitive effect estimates are to its violation. We focus on this task for the common one-sided noncompliance setting where there are two principal strata, compliers and noncompliers. Under PI, compliers and noncompliers share the same…

面板数据中对处理分配设计稳健的双向固定效应回归AI 解读

We propose a new estimator for average causal effects of a binary treatment with panel data in settings with general treatment patterns. Our approach augments the popular two-way-fixed-effects specification with unit-specific weights that arise from a model for the assignment mechanism. We show how to construct these weights in various settings, including the staggered adoption setting, where units opt into the treatment sequentially but permanently. The resulting estimator…

自适应实验中的半参数有效推断AI 解读

We consider the problem of efficient inference of the Average Treatment Effect in a sequential experiment where the policy governing the assignment of subjects to treatment or control can change over time. We first provide a central limit theorem for the Adaptive Augmented Inverse-Probability Weighted estimator, which is semiparametric efficient, under weaker assumptions than those previously made in the literature. This central limit theorem enables efficient inference at…

可能相依观测下近乎最优的非参数序贯检验与置信序列AI 解读

Sequential tests and their implied confidence sequences, which are valid at arbitrary stopping times, promise flexible statistical inference and on-the-fly decision making. However, strong guarantees are limited to parametric sequential tests that under-cover in practice or concentration-bound-based sequences that over-cover and have suboptimal rejection times. In this work, we consider classic delayed-start normal-mixture sequential probability ratio tests, and we provide…

时间一致的中心极限定理与渐近置信序列AI 解读

Confidence intervals based on the central limit theorem (CLT) are a cornerstone of classical statistics. Despite being only asymptotically valid, they are ubiquitous because they permit statistical inference under weak assumptions and can often be applied to problems even when nonasymptotic inference is impossible. This paper introduces time-uniform analogues of such asymptotic confidence intervals, adding to the literature on confidence sequences (CS) -- sequences of…

随机临床试验中协变量调整的一般形式AI 解读

In randomized clinical trials, adjusting for baseline covariates can improve credibility and efficiency for demonstrating and quantifying treatment effects. This article studies the augmented inverse propensity weighted (AIPW) estimator, which is a general form of covariate adjustment that uses linear, generalized linear, and non-parametric or machine learning models for the conditional mean of the response given covariates. Under covariate-adaptive randomization, we…

基于一般多对象比较的谱排序推断AI 解读

This paper studies the performance of the spectral method in the estimation and uncertainty quantification of the unobserved preference scores of compared entities in a general and more realistic setup. Specifically, the comparison graph consists of hyper-edges of possible heterogeneous sizes, and the number of comparisons can be as low as one for a given hyper-edge. Such a setting is pervasive in real applications, circumventing the need to specify the graph randomness and…

将有序处理重新编码为二元指标AI 解读

Researchers using instrumental variables to investigate ordered treatments often recode treatment into an indicator for any exposure. We investigate this estimand under the assumption that the instruments shift compliers from no treatment to some but not from some treatment to more. We show that when there are extensive margin compliers only (EMCO) this estimand captures a weighted average of treatment effects that can be partially unbundled into each complier group's…

残差非线性回归：时变处理与协变量下的因果估计AI 解读

Standard regression adjustment gives inconsistent estimates of causal effects when there are time-varying treatment effects and time-varying covariates. Loosely speaking, the issue is that some covariates are post-treatment variables because they may be affected by prior treatment status, and regressing out post-treatment variables causes bias. More precisely, the bias is due to certain non-confounding latent variables that create colliders in the causal graph. These latent…

随机试验重加权推广：有限样本误差与变量选择AI 解读

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) may suffer from limited scope. In particular, samples may be unrepresentative: some RCTs over- or under- sample individuals with certain characteristics compared to the target population, for which one wants conclusions on treatment effectiveness. Re-weighting trial individuals to match the target population can improve the treatment effect estimation. In this work, we establish the exact expressions of the bias and variance of such…

利用变化中的变化方法纠正样本流失偏差AI 解读

Attrition is a common and potentially important threat to internal validity in treatment effect studies. We extend the changes-in-changes approach to identify the average treatment effect for respondents and the entire study population in the presence of attrition. Our method, which exploits baseline outcome data, can be applied to randomized experiments as well as quasi-experimental difference-in-difference designs. A formal comparison highlights that while widely used…