每日简报

已知有效调整集下高维因果效应估计的 PAC 保证AI 解读

Accurate estimates of causal effects play a key role in decision-making across applications such as healthcare, economics, and operations. In the absence of randomized experiments, a common approach to estimating causal effects uses \textit{covariate adjustment}. In this paper, we study covariate adjustment for discrete distributions from the PAC learning perspective, assuming knowledge of a valid adjustment set $\bZ$, which might be high-dimensional. Our first main result…

变异分析中的交互作用检验AI 解读

Relationships of cause and effect are of prime importance for explaining scientific phenomena. Often, rather than just understanding the effects of causes, researchers also wish to understand how a cause $X$ affects an outcome $Y$ mechanistically -- i.e., what are the causal pathways that are activated between $X$ and $Y$. For analyzing such questions, a range of methods has been developed over decades under the rubric of causal mediation analysis. Traditional mediation…

基于左截断右删失数据的反事实生存泛函去偏机器学习AI 解读

Learning causal effects of a binary exposure on time-to-event endpoints can be challenging because survival times may be partially observed due to censoring and systematically biased due to truncation. In this work, we present debiased machine learning-based nonparametric estimators of the joint distribution of a counterfactual survival time and baseline covariates for use when the observed data are subject to covariate-dependent left truncation and right censoring and when…

评《因子数未知时的稀疏贝叶斯因子分析》：网络潜在空间模型的应用AI 解读

The techniques suggested in Frühwirth-Schnatter et al. (2024) concern sparsity and factor selection and have enormous potential beyond standard factor analysis applications. We show how these techniques can be applied to Latent Space (LS) models for network data. These models suffer from well-known identification issues of the latent factors due to likelihood invariance to factor translation, reflection, and rotation (see Hoff et al., 2002). A set of observables can be…

利用 Lempel–Ziv 复杂度开展因果发现与分类AI 解读

Inferring causal relationships in the decision-making processes of machine learning algorithms is a crucial step toward achieving explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this research, we introduce a novel causality measure and a distance metric derived from Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity. We explore how the proposed causality measure can be used in decision trees by enabling splits based on features that most strongly \textit{cause} the outcome. We further evaluate the…

货币激励与土地所有者偏好：农地转为可再生能源用途的交叉弹性AI 解读

This study examines the impact of monetary factors on the conversion of farmland to renewable energy generation, specifically solar and wind, in the context of expanding U.S. energy production. We propose a new econometric method that accounts for the diverse circumstances of landowners, including their unordered alternative land use options, non-monetary benefits from farming, and the influence of local regulations. We demonstrate that identifying the cross elasticity of…

纵向结果缺失的微随机试验中因果偏离效应的双重稳健估计AI 解读

Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) are increasingly utilized for optimizing mobile health interventions, with the causal excursion effect (CEE) as a central quantity for evaluating interventions under policies that deviate from the experimental policy. However, MRT often contains missing data due to reasons such as missed self-reports or participants not wearing sensors, which can bias CEE estimation. In this paper, we propose a two-stage, doubly robust estimator for CEE in MRTs…

存在未测量混杂时处理效应估计的联合建模方法AI 解读

Estimating treatment effects using observation data often relies on the assumption of no unmeasured confounders. However, unmeasured confounding variables may exist in many real-world problems. It can lead to a biased estimation without incorporating the unmeasured confounding effect. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new mixed-effects joint modeling approach to identifying and estimating the OR function and the PS function in the presence of unmeasured…

用于评估平均与个体处理效应的随机化型 Z 估计AI 解读

Randomized experiments have been the gold standard for drawing causal inference. The conventional model-based approach has been one of the most popular ways for analyzing treatment effects from randomized experiments, which is often carried through inference for certain model parameters. In this paper, we provide a systematic investigation of model-based analyses for treatment effects under the randomization-based inference framework. This framework does not impose any…

自适应采集数据的离策略估计：在线学习的作用AI 解读

We consider estimation of a linear functional of the treatment effect using adaptively collected data. This task finds a variety of applications including the off-policy evaluation (\textsf{OPE}) in contextual bandits, and estimation of the average treatment effect (\textsf{ATE}) in causal inference. While a certain class of augmented inverse propensity weighting (\textsf{AIPW}) estimators enjoys desirable asymptotic properties including the semi-parametric efficiency, much…

基于实质模型相容多重插补的结果缺失敏感性分析及因果应用AI 解读

When using multiple imputation (MI) for missing data, maintaining compatibility between the imputation model and substantive analysis is important for avoiding bias. For example, some causal inference methods incorporate an outcome model with exposure-confounder interactions that must be reflected in the imputation model. Two approaches for compatible imputation with multivariable missingness have been proposed: Substantive-Model-Compatible Fully Conditional Specification…

泊松网络自回归的贝叶斯混合模型AI 解读

In this paper, we propose a new Bayesian Poisson network autoregression mixture model (PNARM). Our model combines ideas from the models of Dahl 2008, Ren et al. 2024 and Armillotta and Fokianos 2024, as it is motivated by the following aims. We consider the problem of modelling multivariate count time series since they arise in many real-world data sets, but has been studied less than its Gaussian-distributed counterpart (Fokianos 2024). Additionally, we assume that the time…

随机干预、敏感性分析与最优传输AI 解读

Recent methodological research in causal inference has focused on effects of stochastic interventions, which assign treatment randomly, often according to subject-specific covariates. In this work, we demonstrate that the usual notion of stochastic interventions have a surprising property: when there is unmeasured confounding, bounds on their effects do not collapse when the policy approaches the observational regime. As an alternative, we propose to study generalized…

利用新两阶段个体合成控制方法估计非正式照护成本AI 解读

Informal carers provide the majority of care for people living with challenges related to older age, long-term illness, or disability. However, the care they provide often results in a significant income penalty for carers, a factor largely overlooked in the economics literature and policy discourse. Leveraging data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this paper provides the first robust causal estimates of the caring income penalty using a novel individual synthetic…

基于方差加权投影的高维二元协变量 Logistic 回归有效贝叶斯推断AI 解读

We address the challenge of conducting inference for a categorical treatment effect related to a binary outcome variable while taking into account high-dimensional baseline covariates. The conventional technique used to establish orthogonality for the treatment effect from nuisance variables in continuous cases is inapplicable in the context of binary treatment. To overcome this obstacle, an orthogonal score tailored specifically to this scenario is formulated which is based…

高维中介分析的贝叶斯变量选择：流行病学代谢组数据应用AI 解读

In epidemiological research, causal models incorporating potential mediators along a pathway are crucial for understanding how exposures influence health outcomes. This work is motivated by integrated epidemiological and blood biomarker studies, investigating the relationship between long-term adherence to a Mediterranean diet and cardiometabolic health, with plasma metabolomes as potential mediators. Analyzing causal mediation in such high-dimensional omics data presents…

正则化多大语言模型协作辅助基于评分的因果发现AI 解读

As the significance of understanding the cause-and-effect relationships among variables increases in the development of modern systems and algorithms, learning causality from observational data has become a preferred and efficient approach over conducting randomized control trials. However, purely observational data could be insufficient to reconstruct the true causal graph. Consequently, many researchers tried to utilise some form of prior knowledge to improve causal…

纵向中介与事件时间结局的贝叶斯半参数因果中介分析AI 解读

Causal mediation analysis of observational data is an important tool for investigating the potential causal effects of medications on disease-related risk factors, and on time-to-death (or disease progression) through these risk factors. However, when analyzing data from a cohort study, such analyses are complicated by the longitudinal structure of the risk factors and the presence of time-varying confounders. Leveraging data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities…

结局非随机缺失下的双重差分设计AI 解读

This paper addresses one of the most prevalent problems encountered by political scientists working with difference-in-differences (DID) design: missingness in panel data. A common practice for handling missing data, known as complete case analysis, is to drop cases with any missing values over time. A more principled approach involves using nonparametric bounds on causal effects or applying inverse probability weighting based on baseline covariates. Yet, these methods are…

用于验证与推断的边际因果流模型AI 解读

Investigating the marginal causal effect of an intervention on an outcome from complex data remains challenging due to the inflexibility of employed models and the lack of complexity in causal benchmark datasets, which often fail to reproduce intricate real-world data patterns. In this paper we introduce Frugal Flows, a novel likelihood-based machine learning model that uses normalising flows to flexibly learn the data-generating process, while also directly inferring the…

将处理效应估计器表示为加权结局AI 解读

Estimators that weight observed outcomes to form effect estimates have a long tradition. Their outcome weights are widely used in established procedures, such as checking covariate balance, characterizing target populations, or detecting and managing extreme weights. This paper introduces a general framework for deriving such outcome weights. It establishes when and how numerical equivalence between an original estimator representation as moment condition and a unique…

识别问题的对抗式方法AI 解读

We introduce a new framework for characterizing identified sets of structural and counterfactual parameters in econometric models. By reformulating the identification problem as a set membership question, we leverage the separating hyperplane theorem in the space of observed probability measures to characterize the identified set through the zeros of a discrepancy function with an adversarial game interpretation. The set can be a singleton, resulting in point identification.…

关于回归不连续设计中双重稳健估计量的说明AI 解读

This note introduces a doubly robust (DR) estimator for regression discontinuity (RD) designs. RD designs provide a quasi-experimental framework for estimating treatment effects, where treatment assignment depends on whether a running variable surpasses a predefined cutoff. A common approach in RD estimation is the use of nonparametric regression methods, such as local linear regression. However, the validity of these methods still relies on the consistency of the…

一般聚束设计中的识别与推断AI 解读

This paper develops an econometric framework and tools for the identification and inference of a structural parameter in general bunching designs. We present point and partial identification results, which generalize previous approaches in the literature. The key assumption for point identification is the analyticity of the counterfactual density, which defines a broader class of distributions than many commonly used parametric families. In the partial identification…