每日简报

预测分位数回归中的统计推断AI 解读

This paper studies inference in predictive quantile regressions when the predictive regressor has a near-unit root. We derive asymptotic distributions for the quantile regression estimator and its heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) t-statistic in terms of functionals of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. We then propose a switching-fully modified (FM) predictive test for quantile predictability. The proposed test employs an FM style correction with a…

正值性不足时的已处理者平均治疗效应AI 解读

The use of propensity score (PS) methods has become ubiquitous in causal inference. At the heart of these methods is the positivity assumption. Violation of the positivity assumption leads to the presence of extreme PS weights when estimating average causal effects of interest, such as the average treatment effect (ATE) or the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT), which renders invalid related statistical inference. To circumvent this issue, trimming or truncating…

最优分类工具变量AI 解读

This paper discusses estimation with a categorical instrumental variable in settings with potentially few observations per category. The proposed categorical instrumental variable estimator (CIV) leverages a regularization assumption that implies existence of a latent categorical variable with fixed finite support achieving the same first stage fit as the observed instrument. In asymptotic regimes that allow the number of observations per category to grow at arbitrary small…

RealTCD：结合大语言模型的干预数据时序因果发现AI 解读

In the field of Artificial Intelligence for Information Technology Operations, causal discovery is pivotal for operation and maintenance of graph construction, facilitating downstream industrial tasks such as root cause analysis. Temporal causal discovery, as an emerging method, aims to identify temporal causal relationships between variables directly from observations by utilizing interventional data. However, existing methods mainly focus on synthetic datasets with heavy…

误差可预测时的反事实结果插补AI 解读

A crucial input into causal inference is the imputed counterfactual outcome. Imputation error can arise because of sampling uncertainty from estimating the prediction model using the untreated observations, or from out-of-sample information not captured by the model. While the literature has focused on sampling uncertainty, it vanishes with the sample size. Often overlooked is the possibility that the out-of-sample error can be informative about the missing counterfactual…

极端处理效应：向极端处理范围外推剂量反应函数AI 解读

The potential outcomes framework serves as a fundamental tool for quantifying causal effects. The average dose-response function (also called the effect curve), denoted as (μ(t)), is typically of interest when dealing with a continuous treatment variable (exposure). The focus of this work is to determine the impact of an extreme level of treatment, potentially beyond the range of observed values--that is, estimating (μ(t)) for very large (t). Our approach is grounded in the…

在控制错误发现率的同时交互式识别具有正向处理效应的个体AI 解读

Out of the participants in a randomized experiment with anticipated heterogeneous treatment effects, is it possible to identify which subjects have a positive treatment effect? While subgroup analysis has received attention, claims about individual participants are much more challenging. We frame the problem in terms of multiple hypothesis testing: each individual has a null hypothesis (stating that the potential outcomes are equal, for example) and we aim to identify those…

异质性面板中的个体平均估计AI 解读

In this work we introduce a unit averaging procedure to efficiently recover unit-specific parameters in a heterogeneous panel model. The procedure consists in estimating the parameter of a given unit using a weighted average of all the unit-specific parameter estimators in the panel. The weights of the average are determined by minimizing an MSE criterion we derive. We analyze the properties of the resulting minimum MSE unit averaging estimator in a local heterogeneity…

弱一致性条件下的局部自然因果学习算法AI 解读

By relaxing conditions for natural structure learning algorithms, a family of constraint-based algorithms containing all exact structure learning algorithms under the faithfulness assumption, we define localised natural structure learning algorithms (LoNS). We also provide a set of necessary and sufficient assumptions for consistency of LoNS, which can be thought of as a strict relaxation of the restricted faithfulness assumption. We provide a practical LoNS algorithm that…

观察数据中的联邦因果推断AI 解读

Decentralized data sources are prevalent in real-world applications, posing a formidable challenge for causal inference. These sources cannot be consolidated into a single entity owing to privacy constraints. The presence of dissimilar data distributions and missing values within them can potentially introduce bias to the causal estimands. In this article, we propose a framework to estimate causal effects from decentralized data sources. The proposed framework avoid…

连续协变量下应对正值性违反的综合估计量AI 解读

Studies intended to estimate the effect of a treatment, like randomized trials, may not be sampled from the desired target population. To correct for this discrepancy, estimates can be transported to the target population. Methods for transporting between populations are often premised on a positivity assumption, such that all relevant covariate patterns in one population are also present in the other. However, eligibility criteria, particularly in the case of trials, can…

通过代理变量条件独立检验进行因果发现AI 解读

Distinguishing causal connections from correlations is important in many scenarios. However, the presence of unobserved variables, such as the latent confounder, can introduce bias in conditional independence testing commonly employed in constraint-based causal discovery for identifying causal relations. To address this issue, existing methods introduced proxy variables to adjust for the bias caused by unobserveness. However, these methods were either limited to categorical…

利用距离秩的信息不平衡推断高维动态过程的因果关系AI 解读

We introduce an approach which allows detecting causal relationships between variables for which the time evolution is available. Causality is assessed by a variational scheme based on the Information Imbalance of distance ranks, a statistical test capable of inferring the relative information content of different distance measures. We test whether the predictability of a putative driven system Y can be improved by incorporating information from a potential driver system X,…

局部隐私保护下的因果发现AI 解读

Differential privacy is a widely adopted framework designed to safeguard the sensitive information of data providers within a data set. It is based on the application of controlled noise at the interface between the server that stores and processes the data, and the data consumers. Local differential privacy is a variant that allows data providers to apply the privatization mechanism themselves on their data individually. Therefore it provides protection also in contexts in…

双重稳健的近端合成控制AI 解读

To infer the treatment effect for a single treated unit using panel data, synthetic control methods construct a linear combination of control units' outcomes that mimics the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome trajectory. This linear combination is subsequently used to impute the counterfactual outcomes of the treated unit had it not been treated in the post-treatment period, and used to estimate the treatment effect. Existing synthetic control methods rely on correctly…

利用存在有限泄漏的工具变量界定因果效应AI 解读

Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular and powerful tool for estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, classical approaches rely on strong assumptions such as the $\textit{exclusion criterion}$, which states that instrumental effects must be entirely mediated by treatments. This assumption often fails in practice. When IV methods are improperly applied to data that do not meet the exclusion criterion, estimated causal effects may be…

收入生产函数的不可识别性AI 解读

Production functions are potentially misspecified when revenue is used as a proxy for output. I formalize and strengthen this common knowledge by showing that neither the production function nor Hicks-neutral productivity can be identified with such a revenue proxy. This result obtains when relaxing the standard assumptions used in the literature to allow for imperfect competition. It holds for a large class of production functions, including all commonly used parametric…

物理过程干扰存在建模不确定性时的电厂排放控制健康效应AI 解读

Causal inference with spatial environmental data is often challenging due to the presence of interference: outcomes for observational units depend on some combination of local and non-local treatment. This is especially relevant when estimating the effect of power plant emissions controls on population health, as pollution exposure is dictated by (i) the location of point-source emissions, as well as (ii) the transport of pollutants across space via dynamic physical-chemical…

结合测量模型的完全潜在主层化AI 解读

There is wide agreement on the importance of implementation data from randomized effectiveness studies in behavioral science; however, there are few methods available to incorporate these data into causal models, especially when they are multivariate or longitudinal, and interest is in low-dimensional summaries. We introduce a framework for studying how treatment effects vary between subjects who implement an intervention differently, combining principal stratification with…

用于生存因果效应的稳定高效协变量平衡估计量AI 解读

We propose an empirically stable and asymptotically efficient covariate-balancing approach to the problem of estimating survival causal effects in data with conditionally-independent censoring. This addresses a challenge often encountered in state-of-the-art nonparametric methods: the use of inverses of small estimated probabilities and the resulting amplification of estimation error. We validate our theoretical results in experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data.

基于孟德尔随机化与多项 GWAS 高效整合的中介分析AI 解读

Mediation analysis is a powerful tool for studying causal pathways between exposure, mediator, and outcome variables of interest. While classical mediation analysis using observational data often requires strong and sometimes unrealistic assumptions, such as unconfoundedness, Mendelian Randomization (MR) avoids unmeasured confounding bias by employing genetic variations as instrumental variables. We develop a novel MR framework for mediation analysis with genome-wide…

局部条件尾部平均处理效应的估计AI 解读

The conditional tail average treatment effect (CTATE) is defined as a difference between the conditional tail expectations of potential outcomes, which can capture heterogeneity and deliver aggregated local information on treatment effects over different quantile levels and is closely related to the notion of second-order stochastic dominance and the Lorenz curve. These properties render it a valuable tool for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study estimation of the…

利用电子健康记录文本支持因果推断AI 解读

In studies that rely on data from electronic health records (EHRs), unstructured text data such as clinical progress notes offer a rich source of information about patient characteristics and care that may be missing from structured data. Despite the prevalence of text in clinical research, these data are often ignored for the purposes of quantitative analysis due their complexity. This paper presents a unified framework for leveraging text data to support causal inference…

利用替代结局估计连续处理效应AI 解读

In many real-world causal inference applications, the primary outcomes (labels) are often partially missing, especially if they are expensive or difficult to collect. If the missingness depends on covariates (i.e., missingness is not completely at random), analyses based on fully observed samples alone may be biased. Incorporating surrogates, which are fully observed post-treatment variables related to the primary outcome, can improve estimation in this case. In this paper,…