每日简报

从因果推断视角预测新用户事件AI 解读

Modeling and analysis for event series generated by users of heterogeneous behavioral patterns are closely involved in our daily lives, including credit card fraud detection, online platform user recommendation, and social network analysis. The most commonly adopted approach to this task is to assign users to behavior-based categories and analyze each of them separately. However, this requires extensive data to fully understand the user behavior, presenting challenges in…

通过 Pearson 风险不变性识别因果广义线性模型AI 解读

Prediction invariance of causal models under heterogeneous settings has been exploited by a number of recent methods for causal discovery, typically focussing on recovering the causal parents of a target variable of interest. Existing methods require observational data from a number of sufficiently different environments, which is rarely available. In this paper, we consider a structural equation model where the target variable is described by a generalized linear model…

在帮助有需要者的同时学习处理效应AI 解读

Many social programs attempt to allocate scarce resources to people with the greatest need. Indeed, public services increasingly use algorithmic risk assessments motivated by this goal. However, targeting the highest-need recipients often conflicts with attempting to evaluate the causal effect of the program as a whole, as the best evaluations would be obtained by randomizing the allocation. We propose a framework to design randomized allocation rules which optimally balance…

将因果推断形式化为目标总体上的预测AI 解读

The standard approach to causal modelling especially in social and health sciences is the potential outcomes framework due to Neyman and Rubin. In this framework, observations are thought to be drawn from a distribution over variables of interest, and the goal is to identify parameters of this distribution. Even though the stated goal is often to inform decision making on some target population, there is no straightforward way to include these target populations in the…

用立方体方法重新审视实验随机化AI 解读

We introduce a new randomization procedure for experiments based on the cube method, which achieves near-exact covariate balance. This ensures compliance with standard balance tests and allows for balancing on many covariates, enabling more precise estimation of treatment effects using pre-experimental information. We derive theoretical bounds on imbalance as functions of sample size and covariate dimension, and establish consistency and asymptotic normality of the resulting…

混杂变量缺失时点暴露因果推断方法的模拟比较AI 解读

Causal inference methods based on electronic health record (EHR) databases must simultaneously handle confounding and missing data. Vast scholarship exists aimed at addressing these two issues separately, but surprisingly few papers attempt to address them simultaneously. In practice, when faced with simultaneous missing data and confounding, analysts may proceed by first imputing missing data and subsequently using outcome regression or inverse-probability weighting (IPW)…

利用辅助总体工具变量识别因果效应与多重稳健估计AI 解读

Estimating causal effects in a target population with unmeasured confounders is challenging, especially when instrumental variables (IVs) are unavailable. However, IVs from auxiliary populations with similar problems can help infer causal effects in the target population. While the homogeneous conditional average treatment effect assumption has been widely used for effect transportability, it has not been explored in IV-based data fusion. We include it as a basic approach,…

存在不依从的2^K析因实验中因果效应的界限AI 解读

Factorial experiments are ubiquitous in the social and biomedical sciences, but when units fail to comply with each assigned factors, identification and estimation of the average treatment effects become impossible without strong assumptions. Leveraging an instrumental variables approach, previous studies have shown how to identify and estimate the causal effect of treatment uptake among respondents who comply with treatment. A major caveat is that these identification…

利用处理局部性改进 A/B 测试中的终身效应估计AI 解读

Utilizing randomized experiments to evaluate the effect of short-term treatments on the short-term outcomes has been well understood and become the golden standard in industrial practice. However, as service systems become increasingly dynamical and personalized, much focus is shifting toward maximizing long-term outcomes, such as customer lifetime value, through lifetime exposure to interventions. Our goal is to assess the impact of treatment and control policies on…

利用观测数据评价处理获益预测器：识别与混杂偏差AI 解读

A treatment benefit predictor (TBP) is a function that maps patient characteristics to an estimate of the treatment benefit for that patient. Such predictors support optimizing individualized treatment decisions, which are central to precision medicine. However, evaluating the predictive performance of a TBP is challenging, as this often must be conducted in a sample where treatment assignment is not random. After briefly reviewing several metrics for evaluating TBPs, we…

数字健康干预中的可重复多臂老虎机算法AI 解读

Adaptive treatment assignment algorithms, such as bandit algorithms, are increasingly used in digital health intervention clinical trials. Frequently, the data collected from these trials is used to conduct causal inference and related data analyses to decide how to refine the intervention, and whether to roll-out the intervention more broadly. This work studies inference for estimands that depend on the adaptive algorithm itself; a simple example is the mean reward under…

利用均匀化与稀疏性估计和计算连续时间动态离散选择博弈AI 解读

Continuous-time empirical dynamic discrete choice games offer notable computational advantages over discrete-time models. This paper addresses remaining computational and econometric challenges to further improve both model solution and estimation. We establish convergence rates for value iteration and policy evaluation with fixed beliefs, and develop Newton-Kantorovich methods that exploit analytical Jacobians and sparse matrix structure. We apply uniformization both to…

预测处理效应分布：协变量调整方法AI 解读

Important questions for impact evaluation require knowledge not only of average effects, but of the distribution of treatment effects. The inability to observe individual counterfactuals makes answering these empirical questions challenging. I propose an inference approach for points of the distribution of treatment effects that uses predicted counterfactuals through covariate adjustment. I provide finite-sample valid inference using sample-splitting and asymptotically valid…

配对整群随机实验中基于设计的处理效应估计框架AI 解读

Paired cluster-randomized experiments (pCRTs) are common in education program impact evaluation trials. Although common, there is surprisingly no clear consensus regarding how to analyze this randomization design to estimate average treatment effects. Variance estimation is also complicated due to the dependency created through pairing clusters. Therefore, we aim to provide an intuitive and practical comparison between different estimation strategies for pCRTs to inform…

线性回归中的潜在权重与隐含因果设计AI 解读

Applied researchers routinely use linear regression to estimate causal effects, justified by quasi-experimental treatment variation, while leaving assumptions on treatment assignment implicit. We formalize a minimal criterion for quasi-experimental interpretation -- that the regression estimates some contrast of potential outcomes under the true assignment process, regardless of potential outcomes -- and characterize its implications for arbitrary regressions. This criterion…

利用主观预期数据估计生产函数AI 解读

Standard proxy methods for estimating production functions in the \Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition require assumptions on input choices. We introduce a new method that exploits (increasingly available) data on firms' expectations of their future output and inputs that allows us to obtain consistent production function parameter estimates while relaxing these input demand assumptions. In contrast to both proxy and dynamic panel methods like Blundell and Bond (2000), our…

竞争风险生存结局的亚组平均处理效应双重稳健目标估计AI 解读

In recent years, precision treatment strategies have gained significant attention in medical research, particularly for patient care. We propose a novel framework for estimating subgroup average treatment effects (ATE) in time-to-event data with competing risks, using ICU patients with sepsis as an illustrative example. Our approach, based on cumulative incidence functions and targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE), achieves both asymptotic efficiency and double…

使用新型集成方法稳健估计条件平均处理效应AI 解读

The estimation of Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) is crucial for understanding the heterogeneity of treatment effects in clinical trials. We evaluate the performance of common methods, including causal forests and various meta-learners, across a diverse set of scenarios, revealing that each of the methods struggles in one or more of the tested scenarios. Given the inherent uncertainty of the data-generating process in real-life scenarios, the robustness of a…

随机实验中分布处理效应的估计：利用机器学习降低方差AI 解读

We propose a novel regression adjustment method designed for estimating distributional treatment effect parameters in randomized experiments. Randomized experiments have been extensively used to estimate treatment effects in various scientific fields. However, to gain deeper insights, it is essential to estimate distributional treatment effects rather than relying solely on average effects. Our approach incorporates pre-treatment covariates into a distributional regression…

一般干预下结局条件化偏效应的识别与推断AI 解读

This paper proposes a new class of distributional causal quantities, referred to as the \textit{outcome conditioned partial policy effects} (OCPPEs), to measure the \textit{average} effect of a general counterfactual intervention of a target covariate on the individuals in different quantile ranges of the outcome distribution. The OCPPE approach is valuable in several aspects: (i) Unlike the unconditional quantile partial effect (UQPE) that is not $\sqrt{n}$-estimable, an…

随机对照试验中的地球观测与效应异质性：数据、模型及评价指标的选择AI 解读

Many social and environmental phenomena are associated with macroscopic changes in the built environment, captured by satellite imagery on a global scale and with daily temporal resolution. While widely used for prediction, these images and especially image sequences remain underutilized for causal inference, especially in the context of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where causal identification is established by design. In this paper, we develop and compare a set of…

单人移动设备非平稳时间序列中的时变因果效应：目标量与识别AI 解读

Mobile technology (mobile phones and wearable devices) generates continuous data streams encompassing outcomes, exposures and covariates, presented as intensive longitudinal or multivariate time series data. The high frequency of measurements enables granular and dynamic evaluation of treatment effect, revealing their persistence and accumulation over time. Existing methods predominantly focus on the contemporaneous effect, temporal-average, or population-average effects,…

面板数据中的异质性分组结构AI 解读

In this paper we examine the existence of heterogeneity within a group, in panels with latent grouping structure. The assumption of within group homogeneity is prevalent in this literature, implying that the formation of groups alleviates cross-sectional heterogeneity, regardless of the prior knowledge of groups. While the latter hypothesis makes inference powerful, it can be often restrictive. We allow for models with richer heterogeneity that can be found both in the…

部分观测线性因果模型的参数可识别性AI 解读

Linear causal models are important tools for modeling causal dependencies and yet in practice, only a subset of the variables can be observed. In this paper, we examine the parameter identifiability of these models by investigating whether the edge coefficients can be recovered given the causal structure and partially observed data. Our setting is more general than that of prior research - we allow all variables, including both observed and latent ones, to be flexibly…