每日简报

高维处理的异质性因果效应估计：联合分析应用AI 解读

Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is an active area of research. Most of the existing methods, however, focus on estimating the conditional average treatment effects of a single, binary treatment given a set of pre-treatment covariates. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the heterogeneous causal effects of high-dimensional treatments, which poses unique challenges in terms of estimation and interpretation. The proposed approach finds maximally…

利用题目级结果估计异质性处理效应：项目反应理论的启示AI 解读

Analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) are common in applied causal inference research. However, when outcomes are latent variables assessed via psychometric instruments such as educational tests, standard methods ignore the potential HTE that may exist among the individual items of the outcome measure. Failing to account for "item-level" HTE (IL-HTE) can lead to both underestimated standard errors and identification challenges in the estimation of…

利用机器学习估计观测网络数据中的处理效应AI 解读

Causal inference methods for treatment effect estimation usually assume independent units. However, this assumption is often questionable because units may interact, resulting in spillover effects between them. We develop augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW) for estimation and inference of the expected average treatment effect (EATE) with observational data from a single (social) network with spillover effects. In contrast to overall effects such as the global…

结合随机试验与真实世界数据的平均处理效应自适应 TMLEAI 解读

We consider the problem of estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) when both randomized control trial (RCT) data and external real-world data (RWD) are available. We decompose the ATE estimand as the difference between a pooled-ATE estimand that integrates RCT and RWD and a bias estimand that captures the conditional effect of RCT enrollment on the outcome. We introduce an adaptive targeted maximum likelihood estimation (A-TMLE) framework to estimate them. We prove…

重复结果结构嵌套均值模型中效应修饰变量选择的惩罚 G 估计AI 解读

Effect modification occurs when the impact of the treatment on an outcome varies based on the levels of other covariates known as effect modifiers. Modeling these effect differences is important for etiological goals and for purposes of optimizing treatment. Structural nested mean models (SNMMs) are useful causal models for estimating the potentially heterogeneous effect of a time-varying exposure on the mean of an outcome in the presence of time-varying confounding. A…

多变量连续处理的效应异质性与重要性度量AI 解读

Estimating the joint effect of a multivariate, continuous exposure is crucial, particularly in environmental health where interest lies in simultaneously evaluating the impact of multiple environmental pollutants on health. We develop novel methodology that addresses two key issues for estimation of treatment effects of multivariate, continuous exposures. We use nonparametric Bayesian methodology that is flexible to ensure our approach can capture a wide range of data…

用于调节效应分析的因果机器学习AI 解读

It is valuable for any decision maker to know the impact of decisions (treatments) on average and for subgroups. The causal machine learning literature has recently provided tools for estimating group average treatment effects (GATE) to better describe treatment heterogeneity. This paper addresses the challenge of interpreting such differences in treatment effects between groups while accounting for variations in other covariates. We propose a new parameter, the balanced…

随机对照试验中分布处理效应估计的回归调整AI 解读

In this paper, we address the issue of estimating and inferring distributional treatment effects in randomized experiments. The distributional treatment effect provides a more comprehensive understanding of treatment heterogeneity compared to average treatment effects. We propose a regression adjustment method that utilizes distributional regression and pre-treatment information, establishing theoretical efficiency gains without imposing restrictive distributional…

替代指标在个体因果效应共形推断中的作用AI 解读

Learning the Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) is essential for personalized decision-making, yet causal inference has traditionally focused on aggregated treatment effects. While integrating conformal prediction with causal inference can provide valid uncertainty quantification for ITEs, the resulting prediction intervals are often excessively wide, limiting their practical utility. To address this limitation, we introduce \underline{S}urrogate-assisted…

第一价格节奏均衡间的干扰：偏差与方差分析AI 解读

Online A/B testing is widely used in the internet industry to inform decisions on new feature roll-outs. For online marketplaces (such as advertising markets), standard approaches to A/B testing may lead to biased results when buyers operate under a budget constraint, as budget consumption in one arm of the experiment impacts performance of the other arm. To counteract this interference, one can use a budget-split design where the budget constraint operates on a per-arm…

有限外生变异下处理效应的识别AI 解读

Multidimensional heterogeneity and endogeneity are important features of a wide class of econometric models. With control variables to correct for endogeneity, nonparametric identification of treatment effects requires strong support conditions. To alleviate this requirement, we consider varying coefficients specifications for the conditional expectation function of the outcome given a treatment and control variables. This function is expressed as a linear combination of…

利用人类反应时间改进基于偏好的线性老虎机学习AI 解读

Interactive preference learning systems infer human preferences by presenting queries as pairs of options and collecting binary choices. Although binary choices are simple and widely used, they provide limited information about preference strength. To address this, we leverage human response times, which are inversely related to preference strength, as an additional signal. We propose a computationally efficient method that combines choices and response times to estimate…

基于匹配的政策学习AI 解读

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy learning has been estimating and maximizing the value function using weighting techniques. Matching is widely used in many applied disciplines to infer causal effects, which is intuitively appealing because the observed covariates are directly…

借助辅助数据识别断点回归设计中的平均因果效应AI 解读

Regression discontinuity designs are widely used when treatment assignment is determined by whether a running variable exceeds a predefined threshold. However, most research focuses on estimating local causal effects at the threshold, leaving the challenge of identifying treatment effects away from the cutoff largely unaddressed. The primary difficulty in this context is that the treatment assignment is deterministically defined by the running variable, violating the…

存在内生性时 Probit 与 Tobit 模型的边际效应AI 解读

When evaluating partial effects, it is important to distinguish between structural endogeneity and measurement errors. In contrast to linear models, these two sources of endogeneity affect partial effects differently in nonlinear models. We study this issue focusing on the Instrumental Variable (IV) Probit and Tobit models. We show that even when a valid IV is available, failing to differentiate between the two types of endogeneity can lead to either under- or…

增强 Lee 界的稳健性并收紧区间：随机单调性与对称性下的样本选择模型AI 解读

In the presence of sample selection, Lee's (2009) nonparametric bounds are a popular tool for estimating a treatment effect. However, the Lee bounds rely on the monotonicity assumption, whose empirical validity is sometimes unclear. Furthermore, the bounds are often regarded to be wide and less informative even under monotonicity. To address these issues, this study introduces a stochastic version of the monotonicity assumption alongside a nonparametric distributional shape…

具有经验学习机制的非平稳非线性群组面板最小二乘估计AI 解读

We discuss techniques of estimation and inference for nonstationary nonlinear cohort panels with learning from experience, showing, inter alia, the consistency and asymptotic normality of the nonlinear least squares estimator used in empirical practice. Potential pitfalls for hypothesis testing are identified and solutions proposed. Monte Carlo simulations verify the properties of the estimator and corresponding test statistics in finite samples, while an application to a…

带协变量的伯努利试验中处理分配的最优相关结构AI 解读

Given covariates for $n$ units, each of which is to receive a treatment with probability $1/2$, we study the question of how best to correlate their treatment assignments to minimize the variance of the IPW estimator of the average treatment effect. Past work by \cite{bai2022} found that the optimal stratified experiment is a matched-pair design, where the matching depends on oracle knowledge of the distributions of potential outcomes given covariates. We study the strictly…

处理效应能否摆脱多重共线性？因果推断中的时间顺序与 Gram–Schmidt 正交化AI 解读

This paper incorporates information about the temporal order of regressors to estimate orthogonal and economically interpretable regression coefficients. We establish new finite sample properties for the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization process. Coefficients are unbiased and stable with lower standard errors than those from Ordinary Least Squares. We provide conditions under which coefficients represent average total treatment effects on the treated and extend the model to…

ARMA-Design：部分可观测时间序列实验中的最优 A/B 处理分配AI 解读

Online experiments %in which experimental units receive a sequence of treatments over time are frequently employed in many technological companies to evaluate the performance of a newly developed policy, product, or treatment relative to a baseline control. In many applications, the experimental units receive a sequence of treatments over time. To handle these time-dependent settings, existing A/B testing solutions typically assume a fully observable experimental environment…

结合结局自适应 Lasso 的增广逆概率加权估计量比较AI 解读

When estimating causal effects from observational data with numerous covariates, employing penalized covariate selection can improve the estimation efficiency. Outcome-oriented covariate selection, which involves selecting covariates related to the outcome, can enhance efficiency, even for propensity score (PS) methods. For outcome-oriented covariate selection in PS models, outcome-adaptive lasso (OAL) can be used for penalization with the oracle property. The performance of…

重复测量中介与结局的连续时间中介分析AI 解读

Mediation analysis aims to decipher the underlying causal mechanisms between an exposure, an outcome, and intermediate variables called mediators. Initially developed for fixed-time mediator and outcome, it has been extended to the framework of longitudinal data by discretizing the assessment times of mediator and outcome. Yet, processes in play in longitudinal studies are usually defined in continuous time and measured at irregular and subject-specific visits. This is the…

利用整数规划分析随机化检验对二元结局误分类的敏感性AI 解读

Conducting a randomization test is a common method for testing causal null hypotheses in randomized experiments. The popularity of randomization tests is largely because their statistical validity only depends on the randomization design, and no distributional or modeling assumption on the outcome variable is needed. However, randomization tests may still suffer from other sources of bias, among which outcome misclassification is a significant one. We propose a model-free…

平均处理效应的半参数单指标估计AI 解读

We propose a semiparametric method to estimate the average treatment effect under the assumption of unconfoundedness given observational data. Our estimation method alleviates misspecification issues of the propensity score function by estimating the single-index link function involved through Hermite polynomials. Our approach is computationally tractable and allows for moderately large dimension covariates. We provide the large sample properties of the estimator and show…