每日简报

误分类且不要求单调性时的二元感染后结局疫苗效力AI 解读

In order to meet regulatory approval, pharmaceutical companies often must demonstrate that new vaccines reduce the total risk of a post-infection outcome like transmission, symptomatic disease, severe illness, or death in randomized, placebo-controlled trials. Given that infection is a necessary precondition for a post-infection outcome, one can use principal stratification to partition the total causal effect of vaccination into two causal effects: vaccine efficacy against…

最小稀疏性下含高维干扰函数的根号样本量一致半参数学习AI 解读

Treatment effect estimation under unconfoundedness is a fundamental task in causal inference. In response to the challenge of analyzing high-dimensional datasets collected in substantive fields such as epidemiology, genetics, economics, and social sciences, various methods for treatment effect estimation with high-dimensional nuisance parameters (the outcome regression and the propensity score) have been developed in recent years. However, it is still unclear what is the…

有限监督下的增益建模AI 解读

Estimating causal effects in e-commerce tends to involve costly treatment assignments which can be impractical in large-scale settings. Leveraging machine learning to predict such treatment effects without actual intervention is a standard practice to diminish the risk. However, existing methods for treatment effect prediction tend to rely on training sets of substantial size, which are built from real experiments and are thus inherently risky to create. In this work we…

多重稳健的因果变化归因AI 解读

Comparing two samples of data, we observe a change in the distribution of an outcome variable. In the presence of multiple explanatory variables, how much of the change can be explained by each possible cause? We develop a new estimation strategy that, given a causal model, combines regression and re-weighting methods to quantify the contribution of each causal mechanism. Our proposed methodology is multiply robust, meaning that it still recovers the target parameter under…

女巫网络下的加权回归AI 解读

In many online domains, Sybil networks -- or cases where a single user assumes multiple identities -- is a pervasive feature. This complicates experiments, as off-the-shelf regression estimators at least assume known network topologies (if not fully independent observations) when Sybil network topologies in practice are often unknown. The literature has exclusively focused on techniques to detect Sybil networks, leading many experimenters to subsequently exclude suspected…

因果参数双重去偏机器学习的任意时点有效推断AI 解读

Double (debiased) machine learning (DML) has seen widespread use in recent years for learning causal/structural parameters, in part due to its flexibility and adaptability to high-dimensional nuisance functions as well as its ability to avoid bias from regularization or overfitting. However, the classic double-debiased framework is only valid asymptotically for a predetermined sample size, thus lacking the flexibility of collecting more data if sharper inference is needed,…

三维面板数据模型的估计与推断AI 解读

Hierarchical panel data models have recently garnered significant attention. This study contributes to the relevant literature by introducing a novel three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical panel data model, which integrates panel regression with three sets of latent factor structures: one set of global factors and two sets of local factors. Instead of aggregating latent factors from various nodes, as seen in the literature of distributed principal component analysis (PCA), we…

主分层间因果中介分析的识别与多重稳健估计AI 解读

We consider assessing causal mediation in the presence of a post-treatment event (examples include noncompliance, a clinical event, or death). We identify natural mediation effects for the entire study population and for each principal stratum characterized by the joint potential values of the post-treatment event. We derive the efficient influence function for each mediation estimand, which motivates a set of multiply robust estimators for inference. The multiply robust…

处理变量含噪且无辅助信息时的可识别因果推断AI 解读

In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates. Previous research has not studied methods that address this issue from a causal viewpoint while allowing for complex nonlinear dependencies and without assuming access to side information. For such a scenario, this study proposes a model that…

连接多个潜在世界：因果部分识别的多边际最优传输方法AI 解读

Under the prevalent potential outcome model in causal inference, each unit is associated with multiple potential outcomes but at most one of which is observed, leading to many causal quantities being only partially identified. The inherent missing data issue echoes the multi-marginal optimal transport (MOT) problem, where marginal distributions are known, but how the marginals couple to form the joint distribution is unavailable. In this paper, we cast the causal partial…

反事实与合成控制：利用工具化主成分分析进行因果推断AI 解读

In this paper, we propose a novel method for causal inference within the framework of counterfactual and synthetic control. Matching forward the generalized synthetic control method, our instrumented principal component analysis method instruments factor loadings with predictive covariates rather than including them as regressors. These instrumented factor loadings exhibit time-varying dynamics, offering a better economic interpretation. Covariates are instrumented through a…

数据组合下平均处理效应估计的比较分析AI 解读

There is growing interest in exploring causal effects in target populations via data combination. However, most approaches are tailored to specific settings and lack comprehensive comparative analyses. In this article, we focus on a typical scenario involving a source dataset and a target dataset. We first design six settings under covariate shift and conduct a comparative analysis by deriving the semiparametric efficiency bounds for the ATE in the target population. We then…

可被数据否证模型的稳健贝叶斯方法AI 解读

We propose a robust Bayesian method for economic models that can be rejected by some data distributions. The econometrician starts with a refutable structural assumption which can be written as the intersection of several assumptions. To avoid the assumption refutable, the econometrician first takes a stance on which assumption $j$ will be relaxed and considers a function $m_j$ that measures the deviation from the assumption $j$. She then specifies a set of prior beliefs $Π_s$…

生存试验中治疗交叉分析的统一三状态模型框架AI 解读

We present a unified three-state model (TSM) framework for evaluating treatment effects in clinical trials in the presence of treatment crossover. Researchers have proposed diverse methodologies to estimate the treatment effect that would have hypothetically been observed if treatment crossover had not occurred. However, there is little work on understanding the connections between these different approaches from a statistical point of view. The proposed TSM framework…

支持可推广推断的整群随机试验设计AI 解读

Background: When planning a cluster randomized trial, evaluators often have access to an enumerated cohort representing the target population of clusters. Practicalities of conducting the trial, such as the need to oversample clusters with certain characteristics to improve trial economy or to support inference about subgroups of clusters, may preclude simple random sampling from the cohort into the trial, and thus interfere with the goal of producing generalizable…

利用相关工具变量集合预测具有多效性调控作用的 GWAS 位点因果基因AI 解读

Multivariate Mendelian randomization (MVMR) is a statistical technique that uses sets of genetic instruments to estimate the direct causal effects of multiple exposures on an outcome of interest. At genomic loci with pleiotropic gene regulatory effects, that is, loci where the same genetic variants are associated to multiple nearby genes, MVMR can potentially be used to predict candidate causal genes. However, consensus in the field dictates that the genetic instruments in…

多暴露与多样本情形下检测和控制选择偏差的图工具AI 解读

Among recent developments in definitions and analysis of selection bias is the potential outcomes approach of Kenah (Epidemiology, 2023), which allows non-parametric analysis using single-world intervention graphs, linking selection of study participants to identification of causal effects. Mohan & Pearl (JASA, 2021) provide a framework for missing data via directed acyclic graphs augmented with nodes indicating missingness for each sometimes-missing variable, which allows…

反事实斜率及其在社会分层研究中的应用AI 解读

This paper addresses two prominent theses in social stratification research, the great equalizer thesis and Mare's (1980) school transition thesis. Both theses describe the role of an intermediate educational transition in the association between socioeconomic status and an outcome variable. However, the descriptive regularities of the two theses may be driven by differential selection into the intermediate transition, which prevents the two theses from having substantive…

矩阵值中介变量的贝叶斯联合中介分析模型AI 解读

Unscheduled treatment interruptions may lead to reduced quality of care in radiation therapy (RT). Identifying the RT prescription dose effects on the outcome of treatment interruptions, mediated through doses distributed into different organs-at-risk (OARs), can inform future treatment planning. The radiation exposure to OARs can be summarized by a matrix of dose-volume histograms (DVH) for each patient. Although various methods for high-dimensional mediation analysis have…

函数型因果发现的诊断工具AI 解读

Causal discovery methods aim to determine the causal direction between variables using observational data. Functional causal discovery methods, such as those based on the Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model (LiNGAM), rely on structural and distributional assumptions to infer the causal direction. However, approaches for assessing causal discovery methods' performance as a function of sample size or the impact of assumption violations, inevitable in real-world scenarios, are…

因果发现中的假设违反与得分匹配的稳健性AI 解读

When domain knowledge is limited and experimentation is restricted by ethical, financial, or time constraints, practitioners turn to observational causal discovery methods to recover the causal structure, exploiting the statistical properties of their data. Because causal discovery without further assumptions is an ill-posed problem, each algorithm comes with its own set of usually untestable assumptions, some of which are hard to meet in real datasets. Motivated by these…

早产儿观察研究中连续工具变量的增强：匹配、部分识别界与推断AI 解读

Regionalization of intensive care for premature babies refers to a triage system of mothers with high-risk pregnancies to hospitals of varied capabilities based on risks faced by infants. Due to the limited capacity of high-level hospitals, which are equipped with advanced expertise to provide critical care, understanding the effect of delivering premature babies at such hospitals on infant mortality for different subgroups of high-risk mothers could facilitate the design of…

利用反事实删失无偏变换估计生存结局的异质性处理效应AI 解读

Methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) from observational data have largely focused on continuous or binary outcomes, with less attention paid to survival outcomes and almost none to settings with competing risks. In this work, we develop censoring unbiased transformations (CUTs) for survival outcomes both with and without competing risks. After converting time-to-event outcomes using these CUTs, direct application of HTE learners for continuous…

利用多重先验强化随机对照试验并学习外部有效性AI 解读

This paper introduces a framework for incorporating prior information into the design of sequential experiments. These sources may include past experiments, expert opinions, or the experimenter's intuition. We model the problem using a multi-prior Bayesian approach, mapping each source to a Bayesian model and aggregating them based on posterior probabilities. Policies are evaluated on three criteria: learning the parameters of payoff distributions, the probability of…