每日简报

PanelMatch：时间序列截面数据因果推断的匹配方法AI 解读

Analyzing time-series cross-sectional (also known as longitudinal or panel) data is an important process across a number of fields, including the social sciences, economics, finance, and medicine. PanelMatch is an R package that implements a set of tools enabling researchers to apply matching methods for causal inference with time-series cross-sectional data. Relative to other commonly used methods for longitudinal analyses, like regression with fixed effects, the…

大语言模型能否辅助因果发现的实验设计？AI 解读

Designing proper experiments and selecting optimal intervention targets is a longstanding problem in scientific or causal discovery. Identifying the underlying causal structure from observational data alone is inherently difficult. Obtaining interventional data, on the other hand, is crucial to causal discovery, yet it is usually expensive and time-consuming to gather sufficient interventional data to facilitate causal discovery. Previous approaches commonly utilize…

高维蛋白基因组数据的多组学生存中介分析框架AI 解读

Survival analysis plays a crucial role in understanding time-to-event (survival) outcomes such as disease progression. Despite recent advancements in causal mediation frameworks for survival analysis, existing methods are typically based on Cox regression and primarily focus on a single exposure or individual omics layers, often overlooking multi-omics interplay. This limitation hinders the full potential of integrated biological insights. In this paper, we propose SMAHP, a…

面向具有网络效应的离散选择设计图卷积神经网络AI 解读

We introduce a novel model architecture that incorporates network effects into discrete choice problems, achieving higher predictive performance than standard discrete choice models while offering greater interpretability than general-purpose flexible model classes. Econometric discrete choice models aid in studying individual decision-making, where agents select the option with the highest reward from a discrete set of alternatives. Intuitively, the utility an individual…

因果推断中多类处理效应的统一估计方法AI 解读

In this paper, we introduce a unified estimator to analyze various treatment effects in causal inference, including but not limited to the average treatment effect (ATE) and the quantile treatment effect (QTE). The proposed estimator is developed under the statistical functional and cumulative distribution function structure, which leads to a flexible and robust estimator and covers some frequent treatment effects. In addition, our approach also takes variable selection into…

含交互效应的动态空间分位数模型的贝叶斯推断AI 解读

With the rapid advancement of information technology and data collection systems, large-scale spatial panel data presents new methodological and computational challenges. This paper introduces a dynamic spatial panel quantile model that incorporates unobserved heterogeneity. The proposed model captures the dynamic structure of panel data, high-dimensional cross-sectional dependence, and allows for heterogeneous regression coefficients. To estimate the model, we propose a…

断点回归设计中的处理效应异质性AI 解读

Empirical studies using Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs often explore heterogeneous treatment effects based on pretreatment covariates, even though no formal statistical methods exist for such analyses. This has led to the widespread use of ad hoc approaches in applications. Motivated by common empirical practice, we develop a unified, theoretically grounded framework for RD heterogeneity analysis. We show that a fully interacted local linear (in functional parameters)…

双重差分与合成控制的结合：双重稳健识别和估计AI 解读

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Synthetic Control (SC) are widely used methods for causal inference in panel data, each with distinct strengths and limitations. We propose a novel method for short-panel causal inference that integrates the advantages of both approaches. Our method delivers a doubly robust identification strategy for the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) under either of two non-nested assumptions: parallel trends or a group-level SC condition.…

时变处理下的因果生存学习AI 解读

This work bridges the gap between staggered adoption designs and survival analysis to estimate causal effects in settings with time-varying treatments, addressing a fundamental challenge in medical research exemplified by the Stanford Heart Transplant study. In medical interventions, particularly organ transplantation, the timing of treatment varies significantly across patients due to factors such as donor availability and patient readiness, introducing potential bias in…

因果协变量应当平衡到什么程度？AI 解读

Covariate balancing is a popular technique for controlling confounding in observational studies. It finds weights for the treatment group which are close to uniform, but make the group's covariate means (approximately) equal to those of the entire sample. A crucial question is: how approximate should the balancing be, in order to minimize the error of the final estimate? Current guidance is derived from heuristic or asymptotic analyses, which are uninformative when the size…

纵向网络的广义网络自回归建模及美国总统选举应用AI 解读

Longitudinal networks are becoming increasingly relevant in the study of dynamic processes characterised by known or inferred community structure. Generalised Network Autoregressive (GNAR) models provide a parsimonious framework for exploiting the underlying network and multivariate time series. We introduce the community-$α$ GNAR model with interactions that exploits prior knowledge or exogenous variables for analysing interactions within and between communities, and can…

通过虚拟博弈数值逼近极小极大遗憾规则AI 解读

Finding numerical approximations to minimax regret treatment rules is of key interest. To do so when potential outcomes are in {0,1} we discretize the action space of nature and apply a variant of Robinson's (1951) algorithm for iterative solutions for finite two-person zero sum games. Our approach avoids the need to evaluate regret of each treatment rule in each iteration. When potential outcomes are in [0,1] we apply the so-called coarsening approach. We consider a…

随机临床试验协变量调整中基于影响函数方差的稳健 g 计算得分检验AI 解读

G-computation has become a widely used robust method for estimating unconditional (marginal) treatment effects with covariate adjustment in the analysis of randomized clinical trials. Statistical inference in this context typically relies on the Wald test or Wald interval, which can be easily implemented using a consistent variance estimator. However, existing literature suggests that when sample sizes are small or when parameters of interest are near boundary values,…

使用实验数据验证观察研究的理论困难AI 解读

Observational data is often readily available in large quantities, but can lead to biased causal effect estimates due to the presence of unobserved confounding. Recent works attempt to remove this bias by supplementing observational data with experimental data, which, when available, is typically on a smaller scale due to the time and cost involved in running a randomised controlled trial. In this work, we prove a theorem that places fundamental limits on this ``best of both…

部分识别计量模型的线性规划方法AI 解读

Sharp bounds on partially identified parameters are often given by the values of linear programs (LPs). This paper introduces a novel estimator of the LP value. Unlike existing procedures, our estimator is root-n-consistent, pointwise in the probability measure, whenever the population LP is feasible and finite. Our estimator is valid under point-identification, over-identifying constraints, and solution multiplicity. Turning to uniformity properties, we prove that the LP…

不同因果发现情境下重抽样技术交互作用的大规模模拟研究AI 解读

Despite the accelerating presence of exploratory causal analysis in modern science and medicine, the available non-experimental methods for validating causal models are not well characterized. One of the most popular methods is to evaluate the stability of model features after resampling the data, similar to resampling methods for estimating confidence intervals in statistics. Many aspects of this approach have received little to no attention, however, such as whether the…

删失与隐藏混杂下高维随机试验和真实世界数据的整合分析AI 解读

In this study, we focus on estimating the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) for survival outcome. The outcome is subject to censoring and the number of covariates is high-dimensional. We utilize data from both the randomized controlled trial (RCT), considered as the gold standard, and real-world data (RWD), possibly affected by hidden confounding factors. To achieve a more efficient HTE estimate, such integrative analysis requires great insight into the data generation…

利用结局信息加权的稳健平均处理效应估计AI 解读

Reliable causal effect estimation from observational data requires adjustment for confounding and sufficient overlap in covariate distributions between treatment groups. However, in high-dimensional settings, lack of overlap often inflates the variance and weakens the robustness of inverse propensity score weighting (IPW) based estimators. Although many approaches that rely on covariate adjustment have been proposed to mitigate these issues, we instead shift the focus to the…

用于纵向因果推断的反馈增强非齐次隐马尔可夫模型AI 解读

Hidden Markov models are widely used for modeling sequential data but typically have limited applicability in observational causal inference due to their strong conditional independence assumptions. I introduce feedback-augmented non-homogeneous hidden Markov model (FAN-HMM), which incorporate time-varying covariates and feedback mechanisms from past observations to latent states and future responses. Integrating these models with the structural causal model framework allows…

将元分析整合到特定研究中以估计条件平均处理效应：InMASSAI 解读

Randomized controlled trials are the standard method for estimating causal effects, ensuring sufficient statistical power and confidence through adequate sample sizes. However, achieving such sample sizes is often challenging. This study proposes a novel method for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) in a target population by integrating and reconstructing information from previous trials using only summary statistics of outcomes and covariates through…

固定时期数线性因子模型中处理效应的识别与估计AI 解读

This paper provides a new approach for identifying and estimating the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated under a linear factor model that allows for multiple time-varying unobservables. Unlike the majority of the literature on treatment effects in linear factor models, our approach does not require the number of pre-treatment periods to go to infinity to obtain a valid estimator. Our identification approach employs a certain nonlinear transformations of the time…

两层嵌套 Logit 与序贯 LogitAI 解读

This technical note provides comprehensive derivations of fundamental equations in two-level nested and sequential logit models for analyzing hierarchical choice structures. We present derivations of the Berry (1994) inversion formula, nested inclusive values computation, and multi-level market share equations, complementing existing literature. While conceptually distinct, nested and sequential logit models share mathematical similarities and, under specific distributional…

用显式分块层级祖先抽样改进不可观测混杂数据生成AI 解读

Unbiased data synthesis is crucial for evaluating causal discovery algorithms in the presence of unobserved confounding, given the scarcity of real-world datasets. A common approach, implicit parameterization, encodes unobserved confounding by modifying the off-diagonal entries of the idiosyncratic covariance matrix while preserving positive definiteness. Within this approach, we identify that state-of-the-art protocols have two distinct issues that hinder unbiased sampling…

层级纵向研究中的半参数生长曲线建模AI 解读

Modeling of growth (or decay) curves arises in many fields such as microbiology, epidemiology, marketing, and econometrics. Parametric forms like Logistic and Gompertz are often used for modeling such monotonic patterns. While useful for compact description, the real-life growth curves rarely follow these parametric forms perfectly. Therefore, the curve estimation methods that strike a balance between prior information in the parametric form and fidelity with the observed…