每日简报

终末事件截断复发事件的主层分析：嵌套贝叶斯非参数方法AI 解读

Recurrent events often serve as key endpoints in clinical studies but may be prematurely truncated by terminal events such as death, creating selection bias and complicating causal inference. To address this challenge, we develop a Bayesian nonparametric framework to address potential selection bias due to truncation by death within the continuous-time principal stratification framework. We introduce causal estimands for recurrent events in the presence of a terminal event…

电子健康记录研究中处理未测混杂的代理变量方法AI 解读

Electronic health records (EHR) are widely used to study clinical decisions, yet unmeasured confounding remains a persistent challenge. Proxy variables offer a potential solution. In EHR data, clinicians already record many such measurements (e.g., vitals), each revealing something about a patient's underlying health. Despite this, proxy-based methods are rarely used in practice. We introduce a new way to use proxies to adjust for unmeasured confounding. Our approach uses a…

工具变量回归的改进推断：结合低维与多工具变量检验AI 解读

Empirical instrumental variables (IV) studies often report separate results based on low-dimensional instruments and many base instruments. This paper proposes a combination test that integrates these commonly reported statistics. The test linearly combines a cluster-robust Wald statistic based on low-dimensional IVs with leave-one-cluster-out Lagrangian Multiplier (LM) and Anderson-Rubin (AR) statistics constructed from many IVs. We establish joint asymptotic normality and…

不让任何人受损：具有遗憾厌恶的政策定向AI 解读

While the importance of personalized policymaking is widely recognized, fully personalized implementation remains rare in practice, often due to legal, fairness or cost concerns. We study the problem of policy targeting for a regret-averse planner when training data gives a rich set of observables while the assignment rules can only depend on its subset. Our regret-averse criterion reflects a planner's concern about regret inequality across the population. This, in general,…

协同干预的因果分解分析：处理多维社会差距的三重稳健机器学习方法AI 解读

Educational disparities are rooted in and perpetuate social inequalities across multiple dimensions such as race, socioeconomic status, and geography. To reduce disparities, most intervention strategies focus on a single domain and frequently evaluate their effectiveness by using causal decomposition analysis. However, a growing body of research suggests that single-domain interventions may be insufficient for individuals marginalized on multiple fronts. While interventions…

事件时间终点缺失数据的临界点敏感性分析：模型法与经验法AI 解读

Treatment policy estimands are frequently favored by regulators, as they assess the effect of treatment assignment regardless of post-randomization events. Despite best efforts, missing data due to study discontinuation cannot be fully avoided and, for time-to-event endpoints, typically manifests as right censoring. Study discontinuation is often more likely following intercurrent events, particularly when it coincides with treatment discontinuation, raising concerns about…

因果森林纳入试验参与变量时的有限样本偏差—方差权衡AI 解读

Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and generalizing them to broader populations is essential for personalizing treatment rules but is complicated by selection bias due to trial participation and potentially high dimensional covariates. We evaluated finite sample bias variance tradeoff for Causal Forest based CATE estimation strategies to address the selection bias. Identification theory suggests unbiased CATE…

基于贝叶斯非参数联合模型的连续时间纵向与生存数据因果中介分析AI 解读

Observational cohort data is an important source of information for understanding the causal effects of treatments on survival and the degree to which these effects are mediated through changes in disease-related risk factors. However, these analyses are often complicated by irregular data collection intervals and the presence of longitudinal confounders and mediators. We propose a causal mediation framework that jointly models longitudinal exposures, confounders, mediators,…

通过隐含干预进行因果推断AI 解读

In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to the interventions the observational distribution allows to identify, rather than starting with a desired causal estimand and imposing untestable conditions. The randomization of an instrument and its exclusion restriction define a class of…

利用截断策略梯度估计量估计非平稳环境中的治疗效应AI 解读

Randomized experiments (or A/B tests) are widely used to evaluate interventions in dynamic systems such as recommendation platforms, marketplaces, and digital health. In these settings, interventions affect both current and future system states, so estimating the global average treatment effect (GATE) requires accounting for temporal dynamics, which is especially challenging in the presence of nonstationarity; existing approaches suffer from high bias, high variance, or…

机器学习分布型工具变量估计中的模型风险AI 解读

We study model risk in machine-learning estimation of the Distributional Instrumental Variable Local Average Treatment Effect (D-IV-LATE), the distributional IV effect for the subpopulation induced into treatment by the instrument. The contribution is not a new neural causal estimand. We implement a reduced-form orthogonal level-score DML estimator for the covariate-adjusted D-IV-LATE target and use it to ask how much the nuisance learner matters for distributional IV…

用双重机器学习估计具有总体代表性的因果效应AI 解读

Double Machine Learning is widely used to estimate treatment effects from non-experimental data. The "residuals-on-residuals" regression (RORR) is especially popular for its simplicity and computational tractability. However, with heterogeneous treatment effects, the proper interpretation of RORR may not be well understood. We show that, for non-binary treatments with continuous dose-response functions, RORR estimates a conditional variance-weighted average of derivatives…

传统分解与因果分解何时分歧？健康差异研究的实用指南AI 解读

Identifying malleable factors that can reduce social disparities is a central objective among researchers across disciplines. Traditionally, researchers have relied on the difference-in-coefficients and Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder frameworks. More recently, methods grounded in the potential outcomes framework have emerged. While these methods share the same goal of identifying drivers of disparity, they frequently yield divergent results depending on the underlying confounding…

正交化合成控制AI 解读

When conducting inference for the average treatment effect on the treated with a Synthetic Control Estimator, the vector of control weights is a nuisance parameter that is often constrained, high-dimensional, and may be only partially identified even when the average treatment effect on the treated is point-identified. All three of these features of a nuisance parameter can lead to failure of asymptotic normality for the estimate of the parameter of interest when using…

允许反馈的非线性面板数据模型矩约束AI 解读

Many panel data methods, while allowing for general dependence between covariates and time-invariant agent-specific heterogeneity, place strong a priori restrictions on feedback: how past outcomes, covariates, and heterogeneity map into future covariate levels. Ruling out feedback entirely, as often occurs in practice, is unattractive in many dynamic economic settings. We provide a general characterization of all feedback and heterogeneity robust (FHR) moment conditions for…

部分干扰下个体处理对网络邻居的向内与向外溢出效应AI 解读

In settings where interference is present, direct effects are commonly defined as the average effect of a unit's treatment on their own outcome while fixing the treatment status or probability among interfering units. Spillover effects measure the average effect of a change in the latter while the individual's treatment status is kept fixed. Here, we define the average causal effect of a unit's treatment status on the outcome of their network neighbors, while fixing the…

基于翻转干预的纵向加权与修剪处理效应AI 解读

Weighting and trimming are popular methods for addressing positivity violations in causal inference. While well-studied with single-timepoint data, standard methods do not easily generalize to address non-baseline positivity violations in longitudinal data, and remain vulnerable to such violations. In this paper, we extend weighting and trimming to longitudinal data via stochastic ``flip'' interventions, which maintain the treatment status of subjects who would have received…

非终末事件时间的因果效应：抗生素使用与未来耐药性AI 解读

Comparing future antibiotic resistance levels resulting from different antibiotic treatments is challenging because some patients may survive only under one of the antibiotic treatments. We embed this problem within a semi-competing risks approach to study the causal effect on resistant infection, treated as a non-terminal event time. We argue that existing principal stratification estimands for such problems exclude patients for whom a causal effect is well-defined and is…

反演得分检验得到的局部平均处理效应置信集性质AI 解读

We study the properties of the score confidence set for the local average treatment effect in non and semiparametric instrumental variable models. This confidence set is constructed by inverting a score test based on an estimate of the nonparametric influence function for the estimand, and is known to be uniformly valid in models that allow for arbitrarily weak instruments; because of this, the confidence set can have infinite diameter at some laws. We characterize the six…

极端与未观测数据中的处理效应估计AI 解读

Causal effect estimation seeks to determine the impact of an intervention from observational data. However, the existing causal inference literature primarily addresses treatment effects on frequently occurring events. But what if we are interested in estimating the effects of a policy intervention whose benefits, while potentially important, can only be observed and measured in rare yet impactful events, such as extreme climate events? The standard causal inference…

自回归超图模型AI 解读

Traditional graph representations are insufficient for modelling real-world phenomena involving multi-entity interactions, such as collaborative projects or protein complexes, necessitating the use of hypergraphs. While hypergraphs preserve the intrinsic nature of such complex relationships, existing models often overlook temporal evolution in relational data. To address this, we introduce a first-order autoregressive (i.e. AR(1)) model for dynamic non-uniform hypergraphs.…

通过统一半参数双重差分方法估计处理效应AI 解读

Difference-in-differences (DID) approaches are widely used for estimating causal effects with observational data before and after an intervention. DID traditionally estimates the average treatment effect among the treated after making a parallel trends assumption on the means of the outcome. With skewed outcomes, a transformation is often needed; however, the transformation may be difficult to choose, results may be sensitive to the choice, and parallel trends assumptions…

高效的双重差分与事件研究估计量AI 解读

This paper investigates efficient Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Event Study (ES) estimation using short panel data sets within the heterogeneous treatment effect framework, free from parametric functional form assumptions and allowing for variation in treatment timing. We provide an equivalent characterization of the DiD potential outcome model using sequential conditional moment restrictions on observables, which shows that the DiD identification assumptions typically…

恰好识别模型中弱工具变量稳健推断程序的实证比较AI 解读

Instrumental variable (IV) regression is recognized as one of the five core methods for causal inference, as identified by Angrist and Pischke (2008). This paper compares two leading approaches to inference under weak identification for just-identified IV models: the classical Anderson-Rubin (AR) procedure and the recently popular tF method proposed by Lee et al. (2022). Using replication data from the American Economic Review (AER) and Monte Carlo simulation experiments, we…