每日简报

仅需两个截面单位的双重差分：民主与增长的新视角AI 解读

Pooled panel analyses often mask heterogeneity in unit-specific treatment effects. This challenge, for example, crops up in studies of the impact of democracy on economic growth, where findings vary substantially due to differences in country composition. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the Temporal Difference-in-Differences (T-DiD) estimator that leverages temporal variation in the data to estimate unit-specific average treatment effects on the treated…

异质性下以百分点表示的平均处理效应估计与推断AI 解读

In semi-logarithmic regressions, treatment coefficients are often interpreted as approximations of an average treatment effect (ATE) in percentage points. This paper highlights the overlooked bias of this approximation under treatment effect heterogeneity, arising from Jensen's inequality. The issue is particularly relevant for difference-in-differences designs with log-transformed outcomes and staggered treatment adoption, where treatment effects may vary across groups and…

利用多个替代指标估计处理效应：替代得分与替代指数AI 解读

Estimating the long-term effects of treatments is of interest in many fields. A common challenge in estimating such treatment effects is that long-term outcomes are unobserved in the time frame needed to make policy decisions. One approach to overcome this missing data problem is to analyze treatments effects on an intermediate outcome, often called a statistical surrogate, if it satisfies the condition that treatment and outcome are independent conditional on the…

实验设计中的启动偏误与处理后偏误AI 解读

Conditioning on variables affected by treatment can induce post-treatment bias when estimating causal effects. Although this suggests that researchers should measure potential moderators before administering the treatment in an experiment, doing so may also bias causal effect estimation if the covariate measurement primes respondents to react differently to the treatment. This paper formally analyzes this trade-off between post-treatment and priming biases in three…

持续混杂下通过数据结合开展长期因果推断AI 解读

We study the identification and estimation of long-term treatment effects when both experimental and observational data are available. Since the long-term outcome is observed only after a long delay, it is not measured in the experimental data, but only recorded in the observational data. However, both types of data include observations of some short-term outcomes. In this paper, we uniquely tackle the challenge of persistent unmeasured confounders, i.e., some unmeasured…

我们遗漏了谁？识别代表性不足人群的系统方法AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) serve as the cornerstone for understanding causal effects, yet extending inferences to target populations presents challenges due to effect heterogeneity and underrepresentation. Our paper addresses the critical issue of identifying and characterizing underrepresented subgroups in RCTs, proposing a novel framework for refining target populations to improve generalizability. We introduce an optimization-based approach, Rashomon Set of…

半监督与高维环境下处理效应估计的一般框架AI 解读

In this article, we aim to provide a general and complete understanding of semi-supervised (SS) causal inference for treatment effects. Specifically, we consider two such estimands: (a) the average treatment effect and (b) the quantile treatment effect, as prototype cases, in an SS setting, characterized by two available data sets: (i) a labeled data set of size $n$, providing observations for a response and a set of high dimensional covariates, as well as a binary treatment…

带基线期的平行整群随机试验：估计目标与常用估计量AI 解读

The parallel cluster randomized trial with baseline (PB-CRT) is a common variant of the standard parallel cluster randomized trial (P-CRT). We define two natural estimands in the context of PB-CRTs with informative cluster sizes, the participant-average treatment effect (pATE) and cluster-average treatment effect (cATE), to address participant and cluster-level hypotheses. In this work, we theoretically derive the convergence of the unweighted and inverse cluster-period size…

双向聚类面板模型的固定 b 渐近理论AI 解读

This paper studies a cluster robust variance estimator proposed by Chiang, Hansen and Sasaki (2024) for linear panels. First, we show algebraically that this variance estimator (CHS estimator, hereafter) is a linear combination of three common variance estimators: the one-way unit cluster estimator, the "HAC of averages" estimator, and the "average of HACs" estimator. Based on this finding, we obtain a fixed-$b$ asymptotic result for the CHS estimator and corresponding test…

政策约束下最优动态处理分配规则的估计AI 解读

Many policies involve dynamics in their treatment assignments, where individuals receive sequential interventions over multiple stages. We study estimation of an optimal dynamic treatment regime that guides the optimal treatment assignment for each individual at each stage based on their history. We propose an empirical welfare maximization approach in this dynamic framework, which estimates the optimal dynamic treatment regime using data from an experimental or…

因果发现之后的有效推断AI 解读

Causal discovery and causal effect estimation are two fundamental tasks in causal inference. While many methods have been developed for each task individually, statistical challenges arise when applying these methods jointly: estimating causal effects after running causal discovery algorithms on the same data leads to "double dipping," invalidating the coverage guarantees of classical confidence intervals. To this end, we develop tools for valid post-causal-discovery…

重新研究含滞后因变量的面板离散选择模型AI 解读

This paper revisits the identification and estimation of a class of semiparametric (distribution-free) panel data binary choice models with lagged dependent variables, exogenous covariates, and entity fixed effects. We provide a novel identification strategy, using an "identification at infinity" argument. In contrast with the celebrated Honore and Kyriazidou (2000), our method permits time trends of any form and does not suffer from the "curse of dimensionality". We propose…

比例数据的边际化三部分中断时间序列回归模型AI 解读

Interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate the effectiveness of a health policy intervention that accounts for the temporal dependence of outcomes. When the outcome of interest is a percentage or percentile, the data can be highly skewed, bounded in $[0, 1]$, and have many zeros or ones. A three-part Beta regression model is commonly used to separate zeros, ones, and positive values explicitly by three submodels. However, incorporating temporal dependence into…

自适应主成分回归及其面板数据应用AI 解读

Principal component regression (PCR) is a popular technique for fixed-design error-in-variables regression, a generalization of the linear regression setting in which the observed covariates are corrupted with random noise. We provide the first time-uniform finite sample guarantees for (regularized) PCR whenever data is collected adaptively. Since the proof techniques for analyzing PCR in the fixed design setting do not readily extend to the online setting, our results rely…

PySDTest：用于随机占优检验的 Python/Stata 软件包AI 解读

We introduce PySDTest, a Python/Stata package for statistical tests of stochastic dominance. PySDTest implements various testing procedures such as Barrett and Donald (2003), Linton et al. (2005), Linton et al. (2010), and Donald and Hsu (2016), along with their extensions. Users can flexibly combine several resampling methods and test statistics, including the numerical delta method (Dümbgen, 1993; Hong and Li, 2018; Fang and Santos, 2019). The package allows for testing…

使用工具变量估计需治疗人数、需暴露人数与暴露影响人数AI 解读

The Number needed to treat (NNT) is an efficacy index defined as the average number of patients needed to treat to attain one additional treatment benefit. In observational studies, specifically in epidemiology, the adequacy of the populationwise NNT is questionable since the exposed group characteristics may substantially differ from the unexposed. To address this issue, groupwise efficacy indices were defined: the Exposure Impact Number (EIN) for the exposed group and the…

通过反演估计方程进行分位数因果推断AI 解读

The causal inference literature frequently focuses on estimating the mean of the potential outcome, whereas quantiles of the potential outcome may carry important additional information. We propose a unified approach, based on the inverse estimating equations, to generalize a class of causal inference solutions from estimating the mean of the potential outcome to its quantiles. We assume that a moment function is available to identify the mean of the threshold-transformed…

情境赌博机的任意时刻有效离策略推断AI 解读

Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to actions $A_t$ in an attempt to maximize stochastic rewards $R_t$. This adaptivity raises interesting but hard statistical inference questions, especially counterfactual ones: for example, it is often of interest to estimate the properties…

时间与个体双重异质环境中的离策略评估AI 解读

This work aims to study off-policy evaluation (OPE) under scenarios where two key reinforcement learning (RL) assumptions -- temporal stationarity and individual homogeneity are both violated. To handle the ``double inhomogeneities", we propose a class of latent factor models for the reward and observation transition functions, under which we develop a general OPE framework that consists of both model-based and model-free approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first paper…

ρ-GNF：利用 Copula 与归一化流分析未观测混杂的敏感性AI 解读

We propose a novel sensitivity analysis to unobserved confounding in observational studies using copulas and normalizing flows. Using the idea of interventional equivalence of structural causal models, we develop $ρ$-GNF ($ρ$-graphical normalizing flow), where $ρ{\in}[-1,+1]$ is a bounded sensitivity parameter. This parameter represents the back-door non-causal association due to unobserved confounding, and which is encoded with a Gaussian copula. In other words, the $ρ$-GNF…

考虑数据隐私的观察性与实验数据融合因果推断AI 解读

Combining observational and experimental data for causal inference can improve treatment effect estimation. However, many observational data sets cannot be released due to data privacy considerations, so one researcher may not have access to both experimental and observational data. Nonetheless, a small amount of risk of disclosing sensitive information might be tolerable to organizations that house confidential data. In these cases, organizations can employ data privacy…

无需显式无环约束的可扩展变分因果发现AI 解读

Bayesian causal discovery offers the power to quantify epistemic uncertainties among a broad range of structurally diverse causal theories potentially explaining the data, represented in forms of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, existing methods struggle with efficient DAG sampling due to the complex acyclicity constraint. In this study, we propose a scalable Bayesian approach to effectively learn the posterior distribution over causal graphs given observational data…

使用局部模型的不变因果预测AI 解读

We consider the task of identifying the causal parents of a target variable among a set of candidates from observational data. Our main assumption is that the candidate variables are observed in different environments which may, under certain assumptions, be regarded as interventions on the observed system. We assume a linear relationship between target and candidates, which can be different in each environment with the only restriction that the causal structure is invariant…

基于稳健降秩回归的 W-MCM 异质性处理效应估计AI 解读

Recently, from the personalized medicine perspective, there has been an increased demand to identify subgroups of subjects for whom treatment is effective. Consequently, the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) has been attracting attention. While various estimation methods have been developed for a single outcome, there are still limited approaches for estimating HTE for multiple outcomes. Accurately estimating HTE remains a challenge especially for datasets…