每日简报

分布共识排序的统计推断AI 解读

Instead of testing for unanimous agreement, I propose learning how broad of a consensus favors one distribution over another (of earnings, productivity, asset returns, test scores, etc.). Specifically, given a sample from each of two distributions, I propose statistical inference methods to learn about the set of utility functions for which the first distribution has higher expected utility than the second distribution. With high probability, an "inner" confidence set is…

随机试验中分配对因果效应定义与识别的作用AI 解读

In randomized trials, the per-protocol effect, that is, the effect of being assigned a treatment strategy and receiving treatment according to the assigned strategy, is sometimes thought to reflect the effect of the treatment strategy itself, without intervention on assignment. Here, we argue by example that this is not necessarily the case. We examine a causal structure for a randomized trial where these two causal estimands -- the per-protocol effect and the effect of the…

用双重差分评估政策效应异质性驱动因素的因果框架AI 解读

Policymakers and researchers often seek to understand how a policy differentially affects a population and the pathways driving this heterogeneity. For example, when studying an excise tax on sweetened beverages, researchers might assess the roles of cross-border shopping, economic competition, and store-level price changes on beverage sales trends. However, traditional policy evaluation tools, like the difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, primarily target average…

健康政策与实践中的双重差分：现代方法综述AI 解读

Difference-in-differences (DiD) is the most popular observational causal inference method in health policy, employed to evaluate the real-world impact of policies and programs. To estimate treatment effects, DiD relies on the "parallel trends assumption", that on average treatment and comparison groups would have had parallel trajectories in the absence of an intervention. Historically, DiD has been considered broadly applicable and straightforward to implement, but recent…

不可观测混杂因素下的动力系统因果关系AI 解读

Causality inference is prone to spurious causal interactions, due to the substantial confounders in a complex system. While many existing methods based on the statistical methods or dynamical methods attempt to address misidentification challenges, there remains a notable lack of effective methods to infer causality, in particular in the presence of invisible/unobservable confounders. As a result, accurately inferring causation with invisible confounders remains a largely…

营销组合模型的识别困境：非线性与时变效应AI 解读

Recent years have seen a resurgence in interest in marketing mix models (MMMs), which are aggregate-level models of marketing effectiveness. Often these models incorporate nonlinear effects, and either implicitly or explicitly assume that marketing effectiveness varies over time. In this paper, we show that nonlinear and time-varying effects are often not identifiable from standard marketing mix data: while certain data patterns may be suggestive of nonlinear effects, such…

利用分段分位数回归改进金融网络中的因果发现AI 解读

Financial networks can be constructed using statistical dependencies found within the price series of speculative assets. Across the various methods used to infer these networks, there is a general reliance on predictive modelling to capture cross-correlation effects. These methods usually model the flow of mean-response information, or the propagation of volatility and risk within the market. Such techniques, though insightful, don't fully capture the broader…

政策学习中的多臂老虎机算法：方法、实现与福利表现AI 解读

Static supervised learning-in which experimental data serves as a training sample for the estimation of an optimal treatment assignment policy-is a commonly assumed framework of policy learning. An arguably more realistic but challenging scenario is a dynamic setting in which the planner performs experimentation and exploitation simultaneously with subjects that arrive sequentially. This paper studies bandit algorithms for learning an optimal individualised treatment…

存在不依从的随机实验中的稳健识别AI 解读

Instrument variable (IV) methods are widely used in empirical research to identify causal effects of a policy. In the local average treatment effect (LATE) framework, the IV estimand identifies the LATE under three main assumptions: random assignment, exclusion restriction, and monotonicity. However, these assumptions are often questionable in many applications, leading some researchers to doubt the causal interpretation of the IV estimand. This paper considers a robust…

二元结局模型中的非线性变换内生性校正：识别与推断AI 解读

For binary outcome models, an endogeneity correction based on nonlinear rank-based transformations is proposed. Identification without external instruments is achieved under one of two assumptions: either the endogenous regressor is a nonlinear function of one component of the error term, conditional on the exogenous regressors, or the dependence between the endogenous and exogenous regressors is nonlinear. Under these conditions, we prove consistency and asymptotic…

结合双重／去偏机器学习的连续处理双重差分AI 解读

This paper extends difference-in-differences to settings with continuous treatments. Specifically, the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) at any level of treatment intensity is identified under a conditional parallel trends assumption. Estimating the ATT in this framework requires first estimating infinite-dimensional nuisance parameters, particularly the conditional density of the continuous treatment, which can introduce substantial bias. To address this…

利用互信息度量对异质数据进行无监督成对因果发现AI 解读

A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed data. In this sense, Causal Discovery is a technique that tackles this challenge by analyzing the statistical properties of the constituent variables. In this work, we target the generalizability of the discovery method by following a…

从因果森林中蒸馏可解释的因果树AI 解读

Machine learning methods for estimating treatment effect heterogeneity promise greater flexibility than existing methods that test a few pre-specified hypotheses. However, one problem these methods can have is that it can be challenging to extract insights from complicated machine learning models. A high-dimensional distribution of conditional average treatment effects may give accurate, individual-level estimates, but it can be hard to understand the underlying patterns;…

用于个体处理效应估计与推断的共形扩散模型AI 解读

Estimating treatment effects from observational data is of central interest across numerous application domains. Individual treatment effect offers the most granular measure of treatment effect on an individual level, and is the most useful to facilitate personalized care. However, its estimation and inference remain underdeveloped due to several challenges. In this article, we propose a novel conformal diffusion model-based approach that addresses those intricate…

如何设定在线 A/B 实验的持续时间AI 解读

In designing an online A/B experiment, it is crucial to select a sample size and duration that ensure the resulting confidence interval (CI) for the treatment effect is the right width to detect an effect of meaningful magnitude with sufficient statistical power without wasting resources. While the relationship between sample size and CI width is well understood, the effect of experiment duration on CI width remains less clear. This paper provides an analytical formula for…

缺乏可观测特征的成对连边形成模型中个体系数的半参数估计AI 解读

Dyadic network formation models have wide applicability in economic research, yet are difficult to estimate in the presence of individual specific effects and in the absence of distributional assumptions regarding the model noise component. The availability of (continuously distributed) individual or link characteristics generally facilitates estimation. Yet, while data on social networks has recently become more abundant, the characteristics of the entities involved in the…

非线性因果模型中离散未测量混杂的控制AI 解读

Unmeasured confounding is a major challenge for identifying causal relationships from non-experimental data. Here, we propose a method that can accommodate unmeasured discrete confounding. Extending recent identifiability results in deep latent variable models, we show theoretically that confounding can be detected and corrected under the assumption that the observed data is a piecewise affine transformation of a latent Gaussian mixture model and that the identity of the…

部分同方差条件下线性模型总因果效应的识别AI 解读

A fundamental challenge of scientific research is inferring causal relations based on observed data. One commonly used approach involves utilizing structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among interacting variables. A directed graph naturally represents these models and reflects the underlying causal structure. However, classical identifiability results suggest that, without conducting additional experiments, this causal graph can only be…

因果图辅助的动脉瘤性蛛网膜下腔出血观察研究因果发现AI 解读

Causal inference methods for observational data are increasingly recognized as a valuable complement to randomized clinical trials (RCTs). They can, under strong assumptions, emulate RCTs or help refine their focus. Our approach to causal inference uses causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). We are motivated by a concern that many observational studies in medicine begin without a clear definition of their objectives, without awareness of the scientific potential, and without…

生存结局高维中介分析的选择后推断AI 解读

It is of substantial scientific interest to detect mediators that lie in the causal pathway from an exposure to a survival outcome. However, with high-dimensional mediators, as often encountered in modern genomic data settings, there is a lack of powerful methods that can provide valid post-selection inference for the identified marginal mediation effect. To resolve this challenge, we develop a post-selection inference procedure for the maximally selected natural indirect…

高维随机系数模型非参数估计的稀疏网格方法AI 解读

A severe limitation of many nonparametric estimators for random coefficient models is the exponential increase of the number of parameters in the number of random coefficients included into the model. This property, known as the curse of dimensionality, restricts the application of such estimators to models with moderately few random coefficients. This paper proposes a scalable nonparametric estimator for high-dimensional random coefficient models. The estimator uses a…

利用可识别变分自编码器处理潜在混杂与处理后变量的因果效应估计AI 解读

Estimating causal effects from observational data is challenging, especially in the presence of latent confounders. Much work has been done on addressing this challenge, but most of the existing research ignores the bias introduced by the post-treatment variables. In this paper, we propose a novel method of joint Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and identifiable Variational AutoEncoder (iVAE) for learning the representations of latent confounders and latent post-treatment…

因果推断中充分调整集的穷尽选择AI 解读

A subvector of predictor that satisfies the ignorability assumption, whose index set is called a sufficient adjustment set, is crucial for conducting reliable causal inference based on observational data. In this paper, we propose a general family of methods to detect all such sets for the first time in the literature, with no parametric assumptions on the outcome models and with flexible parametric and semiparametric assumptions on the predictor within the treatment groups;…

离散选择模型异质参数估计中的深度学习AI 解读

This paper studies the finite sample performance of the flexible estimation approach of Farrell, Liang, and Misra (2021a), who propose to use deep learning for the estimation of heterogeneous parameters in economic models, in the context of discrete choice models. The approach combines the structure imposed by economic models with the flexibility of deep learning, which assures the interpretebility of results on the one hand, and allows estimating flexible functional forms…