每日简报

连续时间生存与事件史分析中边际因果效应识别的图准则AI 解读

We consider continuous-time survival or more general event-history settings, where the aim is to infer the causal effect of a time-dependent treatment process. This is formalised as the effect on the outcome event of a (possibly hypothetical) intervention on the intensity of the treatment process, i.e. a stochastic intervention. To establish whether valid inference about the interventional situation can be drawn from typical observational, i.e. non-experimental, data we…

跨研究异质性处理效应估计的多研究 R-learnerAI 解读

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) is crucial for precision medicine. While multiple studies can improve the generalizability of results, leveraging them for estimation is statistically challenging. Existing approaches often assume identical HTEs across studies, but this may be violated due to various sources of between-study heterogeneity, including differences in study design, study populations, and data collection protocols, among others. To this end, we…

没有外生变异时反向因果关系的可检验性AI 解读

This paper shows that testability of reverse causality is possible even in the absence of exogenous variation, such as in the form of instrumental variables. Instead of relying on exogenous variation, we achieve testability by imposing relatively weak model restrictions and exploiting that a dependence of residual and purported cause is informative about the causal direction. Our main assumption is that the true functional relationship is nonlinear and that error terms are…

改进多地点试验中地点特定效应及其分布的估计AI 解读

In multisite trials, researchers are often interested in several inferential goals: estimating treatment effects for each site, ranking these effects, and studying their distribution. This study seeks to identify optimal methods for estimating these targets. Through a comprehensive simulation study, we assess two strategies and their combined effects: semiparametric modeling of the prior distribution, and alternative posterior summary methods tailored to minimize specific…

用于面板数据因果推断的预测算法AI 解读

Conducting causal inference with panel data is a core challenge in social science research. We adapt a deep neural architecture for time series forecasting (the N-BEATS algorithm) to more accurately impute the counterfactual evolution of a treated unit had treatment not occurred. Across a range of settings, the resulting estimator (``SyNBEATS'') significantly outperforms commonly employed methods (synthetic controls, two-way fixed effects), and attains comparable or more…

lmw：用于因果推断的线性模型权重AI 解读

The linear regression model is widely used in the biomedical and social sciences as well as in policy and business research to adjust for covariates and estimate the average effects of treatments. Behind every causal inference endeavor there is a hypothetical randomized experiment. However, in routine regression analyses in observational studies, it is unclear how well the adjustments made by regression approximate key features of randomized experiments, such as covariate…

函数型数据的多变点检测及生物力学疲劳应用AI 解读

Injuries to the lower extremity joints are often debilitating, particularly for professional athletes. Understanding the onset of stressful conditions on these joints is therefore important in order to ensure prevention of injuries as well as individualised training for enhanced athletic performance. We study the biomechanical joint angles from the hip, knee and ankle for runners who are experiencing fatigue. The data is cyclic in nature and densely collected by body worn…

通过幂似然结合实验与观察数据AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for causal inference and play a pivotal role in modern evidence-based medicine. However, the sample sizes they use are often too limited to draw significant causal conclusions for subgroups that are less prevalent in the population. In contrast, observational data are becoming increasingly accessible in large volumes but can be subject to bias as a result of hidden confounding. Given these complementary features, we propose…

日前电价预测的自适应标准化方法AI 解读

The study of Day-Ahead prices in the electricity market is one of the most popular problems in time series forecasting. Previous research has focused on employing increasingly complex learning algorithms to capture the sophisticated dynamics of the market. However, there is a threshold where increased complexity fails to yield substantial improvements. In this work, we propose an alternative approach by introducing an adaptive standardisation to mitigate the effects of…

点到区域随机效应的时空极值建模AI 解读

One measurement modality for rainfall is a fixed location rain gauge. However, extreme rainfall, flooding, and other climate extremes often occur at larger spatial scales and affect more than one location in a community. For example, in 2017 Hurricane Harvey impacted all of Houston and the surrounding region causing widespread flooding. Flood risk modeling requires understanding of rainfall for hydrologic regions, which may contain one or more rain gauges. Further, policy…

增强型 HP 滤波器的适用范围比想象中更广AI 解读

The global financial crisis and Covid recession have renewed discussion concerning trend-cycle discovery in macroeconomic data, and boosting has recently upgraded the popular HP filter to a modern machine learning device suited to data-rich and rapid computational environments. This paper extends boosting's trend determination capability to higher order integrated processes and time series with roots that are local to unity. The theory is established by understanding the…

混杂下的悲观策略：部分可观测决策过程中的高效离线强化学习AI 解读

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to learn an optimal policy from a dataset collected by a behavior policy which possibly depends on the latent state. Such a dataset is confounded in the sense that the latent state simultaneously affects the action and the observation, which is prohibitive for existing offline RL algorithms. To this end, we propose the \underline{P}roxy variable…

一类广义层级模型的估计与推断AI 解读

In this paper, we consider estimation and inference for the unknown parameters and function involved in a class of generalized hierarchical models. Such models are of great interest in the literature of neural networks (such as Bauer and Kohler, 2019). We propose a rectified linear unit (ReLU) based deep neural network (DNN) approach, and contribute to the design of DNN by i) providing more transparency for practical implementation, ii) defining different types of sparsity,…

已知倾向得分下个体治疗获益概率的高置信度推断AI 解读

We seek to understand the probability an individual benefits from treatment (PIBT), an inestimable quantity that must be bounded in practice. Given the innate uncertainty in the population-level bounds on PIBT, we seek to better understand the margin of error for their estimation in order to discern whether the estimated bounds on PIBT are tight or wide due to random chance or not. Toward this goal, we present guarantees to the estimation of bounds on marginal PIBT, with any…

不确定的短期限制与统计识别的结构向量自回归AI 解读

This study proposes a combination of a statistical identification approach with potentially invalid short-run zero restrictions. The estimator shrinks towards imposed restrictions and stops shrinkage when the data provide evidence against a restriction. Simulation results demonstrate how incorporating valid restrictions through the shrinkage approach enhances the accuracy of the statistically identified estimator and how the impact of invalid restrictions decreases with the…

连续处理后变量的主层分层：非参数识别与半参数估计AI 解读

Post-treatment variables often complicate causal inference. They appear in many scientific problems, including noncompliance, truncation by death, mediation, and surrogate endpoint evaluation. Principal stratification is a strategy to address these challenges by adjusting for the potential values of the post-treatment variables, defined as the principal strata. It allows for characterizing treatment effect heterogeneity across principal strata and unveiling the mechanism of…

相信你的梯度：面向因果发现的梯度式干预目标选择AI 解读

Inferring causal structure from data is a challenging task of fundamental importance in science. Observational data are often insufficient to identify a system's causal structure uniquely. While conducting interventions (i.e., experiments) can improve the identifiability, such samples are usually challenging and expensive to obtain. Hence, experimental design approaches for causal discovery aim to minimize the number of interventions by estimating the most informative…

基于双重机器学习的因果混合建模AI 解读

Hybrid modeling integrates machine learning with scientific knowledge to enhance interpretability, generalization, and adherence to natural laws. Nevertheless, equifinality and regularization biases pose challenges in hybrid modeling to achieve these purposes. This paper introduces a novel approach to estimating hybrid models via a causal inference framework, specifically employing Double Machine Learning (DML) to estimate causal effects. We showcase its use for the Earth…

利用已知变量与未知潜在因素开展高维预测AI 解读

Forecasts play a central role in decision making under uncertainty. After a brief review of the general issues, this paper considers ways of using high-dimensional data in forecasting. We consider selecting variables from a known active set, known knowns, using Lasso and OCMT, and approximating unobserved latent factors, known unknowns, by various means. This combines both sparse and dense approaches. We demonstrate the various issues involved in variable selection in a…

最大化机器学习可预测性的投资组合AI 解读

When it comes to stock returns, any form of predictability can bolster risk-adjusted profitability. We develop a collaborative machine learning algorithm that optimizes portfolio weights so that the resulting synthetic security is maximally predictable. Precisely, we introduce MACE, a multivariate extension of Alternating Conditional Expectations that achieves the aforementioned goal by wielding a Random Forest on one side of the equation, and a constrained Ridge Regression…

最优加权平均导数效应AI 解读

Weighted average derivative effects (WADEs) are nonparametric estimands with uses in economics and causal inference. Debiased WADE estimators typically require learning the conditional mean outcome as well as a Riesz representer (RR) that characterises the requisite debiasing corrections. RR estimators for WADEs often rely on kernel estimators, introducing complicated bandwidth-dependant biases. In our work we propose a new class of RRs that are isomorphic to the class of…

Welch 谱密度估计方法的去偏AI 解读

Welch's method provides an estimator of the power spectral density that is statistically consistent. This is achieved by averaging over periodograms calculated from overlapping segments of a time series. For a finite length time series, while the variance of the estimator decreases as the number of segments increase, the magnitude of the estimator's bias increases: a bias-variance trade-off ensues when setting the segment number. We address this issue by providing a novel…

可逆潜在因果模型中领域反事实的刻画AI 解读

Answering counterfactual queries has important applications such as explainability, robustness, and fairness but is challenging when the causal variables are unobserved and the observations are non-linear mixtures of these latent variables, such as pixels in images. One approach is to recover the latent Structural Causal Model (SCM), which may be infeasible in practice due to requiring strong assumptions, e.g., linearity of the causal mechanisms or perfect atomic…

分层随机化的组合中心极限定理AI 解读

This paper establishes a combinatorial central limit theorem for stratified randomization, which holds under a Lindeberg-type condition. The theorem allows for an arbitrary number or sizes of strata, with the sole requirement being that each stratum contains at least two units. This flexibility accommodates both a growing number of large and small strata simultaneously, while imposing minimal conditions. We then apply this result to derive the asymptotic distributions of two…