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美国阿片类药物流行高成本模拟中的处理效应估计模型选择AI 解读

Agent-based simulation with a synthetic population can help us compare different treatment conditions while keeping everything else constant within the same population (i.e., as digital twins). Such population-scale simulations require large computational power (i.e., CPU resources) to get accurate estimates for treatment effects. We can use meta models of the simulation results to circumvent the need to simulate every treatment condition. Selecting the best estimating model…

动态选择下实验与观察数据结合的信息含量AI 解读

This paper addresses the challenge of estimating the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated Survivors (ATETS; Vikstrom et al., 2018) in the absence of long-term experimental data, utilizing available long-term observational data instead. We establish two theoretical results. First, it is impossible to obtain informative bounds for the ATETS with no model restriction and no auxiliary data. Second, to overturn this negative result, we explore as a promising avenue the recent…

用于因果推断的样本经验似然方法AI 解读

Causal inference is crucial for understanding the true impact of interventions, policies, or actions, enabling informed decision-making and providing insights into the underlying mechanisms that shape our world. In this paper, we establish a framework for the estimation and inference of average treatment effects using a two-sample empirical likelihood function. Two different approaches to incorporating propensity scores are developed. The first approach introduces propensity…

用于极端河流流量建模的最大自回归移动平均过程的极值性质AI 解读

Max-autogressive moving average (Max-ARMA) processes are powerful tools for modelling time series data with heavy-tailed behaviour; these are a non-linear version of the popular autoregressive moving average models. River flow data typically have features of heavy tails and non-linearity, as large precipitation events cause sudden spikes in the data that then exponentially decay. Therefore, stationary Max-ARMA models are a suitable candidate for capturing the unique temporal…

工具变量模型中的抗污染推断AI 解读

The classical tests in the instrumental variable model can behave arbitrarily if the data is contaminated. For instance, one outlying observation can be enough to change the outcome of a test. We develop a framework to construct testing procedures that are robust to weak instruments, outliers and heavy-tailed errors in the instrumental variable model. The framework is constructed upon M-estimators. By deriving the influence functions of the classical weak instrument robust…

协变量调整的生存概率组序贯比较AI 解读

In confirmatory clinical trials, survival outcomes are frequently studied and interim analyses for efficacy and/or futility are often desirable. Methods such as the log rank test and Cox regression model are commonly used to compare treatments in this setting. They rely on a proportional hazards (PH) assumption and are subject to type I error rate inflation and loss of power when PH are violated. Such violations may be expected a priori, particularly when the mechanisms of…

网络关联数据的高维因子分析AI 解读

Factor analysis is a widely used statistical tool in many scientific disciplines, such as psychology, economics, and sociology. As observations linked by networks become increasingly common, incorporating network structures into factor analysis remains an open problem. In this paper, we focus on high-dimensional factor analysis involving network-connected observations, and propose a generalized factor model with latent factors that account for both the network structure and…

基于两个次序统计量的反卷积AI 解读

Economic data are often contaminated by measurement errors and truncated by ranking. This paper shows that the classical measurement error model with independent and additive measurement errors is identified nonparametrically using only two order statistics of repeated measurements. The identification result confirms a hypothesis by Athey and Haile (2002) for a symmetric ascending auction model with unobserved heterogeneity. Extensions allow for heterogeneous measurement…

惩罚化偏差缩减的双重稳健因果推断：融合非概率样本与设计调查AI 解读

Causal inference on the average treatment effect (ATE) using non-probability samples, such as electronic health records (EHR), faces challenges from sample selection bias and high-dimensional covariates. This requires considering a selection model alongside treatment and outcome models that are typical ingredients in causal inference. This paper considers integrating large non-probability samples with external probability samples from a design survey, addressing moderately…

伪对数似然方法的一项修正AI 解读

Pseudo log-likelihood is a type of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method used in various fields including contextual bandits, influence maximization of social networks, and causal bandits. However, in previous literature \citep{li2017provably, zhang2022online, xiong2022combinatorial, feng2023combinatorial1, feng2023combinatorial2}, the log-likelihood function may not be bounded, which may result in the algorithm they proposed not well-defined. In this paper, we give a…

外部有效性中的重叠条件违反AI 解读

Estimating externally valid causal effects is a foundational problem in the social and biomedical sciences. Generalizing or transporting causal estimates from an experimental sample to a target population of interest relies on an overlap assumption between the experimental sample and the target population--i.e., all units in the target population must have a non-zero probability of being included in the experiment. In practice, having full overlap between an experimental…

“喧哗与骚动”：跳跃与噪声下波动率矩阵非线性泛函的推断AI 解读

This paper resolves a pivotal open problem on nonparametric inference for nonlinear functionals of volatility matrix. Multiple prominent statistical tasks can be formulated as functionals of volatility matrix, yet a unified statistical theory of general nonlinear functionals based on noisy data remains challenging and elusive. Nonetheless, this paper shows it can be achieved by combining the strengths of pre-averaging, jump truncation and nonlinearity bias correction. In…

C-XGBoost：用于因果效应估计的树提升模型AI 解读

Causal effect estimation aims at estimating the Average Treatment Effect as well as the Conditional Average Treatment Effect of a treatment to an outcome from the available data. This knowledge is important in many safety-critical domains, where it often needs to be extracted from observational data. In this work, we propose a new causal inference model, named C-XGBoost, for the prediction of potential outcomes. The motivation of our approach is to exploit the superiority of…

从含噪观测估计高斯—马尔可夫过程的样本路径AI 解读

I derive the pointwise conditional means and variances of an arbitrary Gauss-Markov process, given noisy observations of points on a sample path. These moments depend on the process's mean and covariance functions, and on the conditional moments of the sampled points. I study the Brownian motion and bridge as special cases.

始终存活者及其他人群因果效应界限的统一框架AI 解读

We investigate the bounding problem of causal effects in experimental studies in which the outcome is truncated by death, meaning that the subject dies before the outcome can be measured. Causal effects cannot be point identified without instruments and/or tight parametric assumptions but can be bounded under mild restrictions. Previous work on partial identification under the principal stratification framework has primarily focused on the `always-survivor' subpopulation. In…

处理分配不平衡下双重稳健估计量的校准AI 解读

Machine learning methods, particularly the double machine learning (DML) estimator (Chernozhukov et al., 2018), are increasingly popular for the estimation of the average treatment effect (ATE). However, datasets often exhibit unbalanced treatment assignments where only a few observations are treated, leading to unstable propensity score estimations. We propose a simple extension of the DML estimator which undersamples data for propensity score modeling and calibrates scores…

随机效用模型非参数刻画的对偶方法AI 解读

This paper develops a novel characterization for random utility models (RUM), which turns out to be a dual representation of the characterization by Kitamura and Stoye (2018, ECMA). For a given family of budgets and its "patch" representation á la Kitamura and Stoye, we construct a matrix $Ξ$ of which each row vector indicates the structure of possible revealed preference relations in each subfamily of budgets. Then, it is shown that a stochastic demand system on the patches…

通过最优传输自动校正异常值AI 解读

In this paper, we propose a novel conceptual framework to detect outliers using optimal transport with a concave cost function. Conventional outlier detection approaches typically use a two-stage procedure: first, outliers are detected and removed, and then estimation is performed on the cleaned data. However, this approach does not inform outlier removal with the estimation task, leaving room for improvement. To address this limitation, we propose an automatic outlier…

有限监督下的增益建模AI 解读

Estimating causal effects in e-commerce tends to involve costly treatment assignments which can be impractical in large-scale settings. Leveraging machine learning to predict such treatment effects without actual intervention is a standard practice to diminish the risk. However, existing methods for treatment effect prediction tend to rely on training sets of substantial size, which are built from real experiments and are thus inherently risky to create. In this work we…

含噪声且异步的高频数据下因子型瞬时波动率矩阵估计AI 解读

We propose a new estimator of high-dimensional spot volatility matrices satisfying a low-rank plus sparse structure from noisy and asynchronous high-frequency data collected for an ultra-large number of assets. The noise processes are allowed to be temporally correlated, heteroskedastic, asymptotically vanishing and dependent on the efficient prices. We define a kernel-weighted pre-averaging method to jointly tackle the microstructure noise and asynchronicity issues, and we…

未观测混杂下的公平性审计AI 解读

Many definitions of fairness or inequity involve unobservable causal quantities that cannot be directly estimated without strong assumptions. For instance, it is particularly difficult to estimate notions of fairness that rely on hard-to-measure concepts such as risk (e.g., quantifying whether patients at the same risk level have equal probability of treatment, regardless of group membership). Such measurements of risk can be accurately obtained when no unobserved…

对数凹反事实密度的双重稳健估计与推断AI 解读

We consider the problem of causal inference based on observational data (or the related missing data problem) with a binary or discrete treatment variable. In that context, we study inference for the counterfactual density functions and contrasts thereof, which can provide more nuanced information than counterfactual means and the average treatment effect. We impose the shape-constraint of log-concavity, a type of unimodality constraint, on the counterfactual densities, and…

结构向量自回归模型中的祖先回归AI 解读

We present a new method for causal discovery in linear structural vector autoregressive models. We adapt an idea designed for independent observations to the case of time series while retaining its favorable properties, i.e., explicit error control for false causal discovery, at least asymptotically. We apply our method to several real-world bivariate time series datasets and discuss its findings which mostly agree with common understanding. The arrow of time in a model can…

重复测量中介与结局的连续时间中介分析AI 解读

Mediation analysis aims to decipher the underlying causal mechanisms between an exposure, an outcome, and intermediate variables called mediators. Initially developed for fixed-time mediator and outcome, it has been extended to the framework of longitudinal data by discretizing the assessment times of mediator and outcome. Yet, processes in play in longitudinal studies are usually defined in continuous time and measured at irregular and subject-specific visits. This is the…