每日简报

异质处理下的效应异质性分析AI 解读

Analysis of effect heterogeneity at the group level is standard practice in empirical treatment evaluation. However, treatments analyzed are often aggregates of multiple underlying treatments which are themselves heterogeneous, e.g. different modules of training programs. In these settings, conventional approaches such as comparing (adjusted) differences-in-means across groups can produce misleading conclusions when underlying treatment propensities differ systematically…

区域组成数据的时空自回归模型AI 解读

Compositional data, such as regional shares of economic sectors or property transactions, are central to understanding structural change in economic systems across space and time. This paper introduces a spatiotemporal multivariate autoregressive model tailored for panel data with composition-valued responses at each areal unit and time point. The proposed framework enables the joint modelling of temporal dynamics and spatial dependence under compositional constraints, and…

借助外部数据稳健估计随机试验中的异质性处理效应AI 解读

Randomized trials are typically designed to detect average treatment effects but often lack the statistical power to uncover individual-level treatment effect heterogeneity, limiting their value for personalized decision-making. To address this, we propose the QR-learner, a model-agnostic learner that estimates conditional average treatment effects (CATE) within the trial population by leveraging external data from other trials or observational studies. The proposed method…

观测因果推断中不完全识别下的相对偏差AI 解读

To conduct causal inference in observational settings, researchers must rely on certain identifying assumptions. In practice, these assumptions are unlikely to hold exactly. This paper considers the bias of selection-on-observables, instrumental variables, and proximal inference estimates under violations of their identifying assumptions. We develop bias expressions for IV and proximal inference that show how violations of their respective assumptions are amplified by any…

跨世界假设与个体处理效应预测区间的细化AI 解读

While average treatment effects (ATE) and conditional average treatment effects (CATE) provide valuable population- and subgroup-level summaries, they fail to capture uncertainty at the individual level. For high-stakes decision-making, individual treatment effect (ITE) estimates must be accompanied by valid prediction intervals that reflect heterogeneity and unit-specific uncertainty. However, the fundamental unidentifiability of ITEs limits the ability to derive precise…

通过 Softmax 平滑推断最优政策价值及其他非正则泛函AI 解读

Constructing confidence intervals for the value of an (unknown) optimal treatment policy is a fundamental problem in causal inference. Insight into the optimal policy value can guide the development of reward-maximizing, individualized treatment regimes. However, because the functional that defines the optimal value is non-differentiable, standard semi-parametric approaches for performing inference fail to be directly applicable. Many existing works circumvent…

用于高维因果生存分析的马蹄先验森林AI 解读

We develop a Bayesian tree ensemble model to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in censored survival data with high-dimensional covariates. Instead of imposing sparsity through the tree structure, we place a horseshoe prior directly on the step heights to achieve adaptive global-local shrinkage. This strategy allows flexible regularisation and reduces noise. We develop a reversible jump Gibbs sampler to accommodate the non-conjugate horseshoe prior within the tree…

通过 Mallows 型模型平均实现广义最优参数迁移学习AI 解读

In many economic applications, multiple source datasets are available, but their effective combination is challenging due to heterogeneity across datasets. To address this problem, we study a parameter-transfer framework that shares only source-side estimates and propose a Mallows-type model averaging method for combining target and source models in the parametric setting. The weights are obtained from a Mallows-type criterion that is unbiased for the target prediction risk…

安慰剂断点设计AI 解读

Standard regression discontinuity design (RDD) models rely on the continuity of expected potential outcomes at the cutoff. The standard continuity assumption can be violated by strategic manipulation of the running variable, which is realistic when the cutoff is widely known and when the treatment of interest is a social program or government benefit. In this work, we identify the treatment effect despite such a violation, by leveraging a placebo treatment and a placebo…

阶梯楔形集群随机试验中的模型稳健标准化AI 解读

Stepped-wedge cluster-randomized trials (SW-CRTs) are widely used in healthcare and implementation science, enabling all clusters to receive the intervention through a staggered rollout. Traditional model-based methods, including generalized estimating equations and mixed models, yield estimates that depend on implicit weighting schemes and parametric assumptions, and therefore may target ambiguous estimands under model misspecification. In this article, we propose a…

重症监护中的锚回归域泛化与域适应AI 解读

The performance of predictive models in clinical settings often degrades when deployed in new hospitals due to distribution shifts. This paper presents a large-scale study of causality-inspired domain generalization on heterogeneous multi-center intensive care unit (ICU) data. We apply anchor regression and introduce anchor boosting, a novel, tree-based nonlinear extension, to a large dataset comprising 400,000 patients from nine distinct ICU databases. We find that anchor…

临床试验缺失数据的因果参照模型贝叶斯分析AI 解读

The statistical analysis of clinical trials is often complicated by missing data. Patients sometimes experience intercurrent events (ICEs), which usually (although not always) lead to missing subsequent outcome measurements for such individuals. The reference-based imputation methods were proposed by Carpenter et al. (2013) and have been commonly adopted for handling missing data due to ICEs when estimating treatment policy strategy estimands. Conventionally, the variance…

可分离、自然与干预间接效应之间的关系AI 解读

Recently, the separable indirect effect (SIE) has gained attention due to its identifiability without requiring the untestable cross-world assumption necessary for the natural indirect effect (NIE). This article systematically compares the causal assumptions underlying the SIE, NIE, and interventional indirect effect (IIE) and evaluates their feasibility for mediational interpretation using the mediation null criterion, with a particular focus on the SIE. We demonstrate…

平衡神经网络加权下的一般治疗模型去偏高效估计AI 解读

Estimation and inference of treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignments often suffer from bias and the `curse of dimensionality' due to the nonparametric estimation of nuisance parameters for high-dimensional confounders. Although debiased state-of-the-art methods have been proposed for binary treatments under particular treatment models, they can be unstable for small sample sizes. Moreover, directly extending them to general treatment models can lead to…

使用 IQ-BART 的生成式回归AI 解读

Implicit Quantile BART (IQ-BART) posits a non-parametric Bayesian model on the conditional quantile function, acting as a model over a conditional model for $Y$ given $X$. One of the key ingredients is augmenting the observed data $\{(Y_i,X_i)\}_{i=1}^n$ with uniformly sampled values $τ_i$ for $1\leq i\leq n$ which serve as training data for quantile function estimation. Using the fact that the location parameter $μ$ in a $τ$-tilted asymmetric Laplace distribution…

跨组分配的一致标记：降低条件平均治疗效应估计方差AI 解读

Numerous algorithms have been developed for Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation. In this paper, we first highlight a common issue where many algorithms exhibit inconsistent learning behavior for the same instance across different group assignments. We introduce a metric to quantify and visualize this inconsistency. Next, we present a theoretical analysis showing that this inconsistency indeed contributes to higher test errors and cannot be resolved through…

面板数据准实验因果推断中高斯过程建模的实践考量AI 解读

Estimating causal effects in quasi-experiments with spatio-temporal panel data often requires adjusting for unmeasured confounding that varies across space and time. Gaussian Processes (GPs) offer a flexible, nonparametric modeling approach that can account for such complex dependencies through carefully chosen covariance kernels. In this paper, we provide a practical and interpretable framework for applying GPs to causal inference in panel data settings. We demonstrate how…

盲式定向：第三方隐私约束下的个性化AI 解读

Major advertising platforms recently increased privacy protections by limiting advertisers' access to individual-level data. Instead of providing access to granular raw data, the platforms only allow a limited number of aggregate queries to a dataset, which is further protected by adding differentially private noise. This paper studies whether and how advertisers can design effective targeting policies within these restrictive privacy preserving data environments. To achieve…

利用聚 bunching 设计识别因果效应AI 解读

We show that causal effects can be identified when there is bunching in the distribution of a continuous treatment variable, without imposing any parametric assumptions. This yields a new nonparametric method for overcoming selection bias in the absence of instrumental variables, panel data, or other popular research designs for causal inference. The method leverages the change of variables theorem from integration theory, relating the selection bias to the ratio of the…

Factor models for longitudinal data, where policy adoption is unconfounded with respect to a low-dimensional set of latent factor loadings, have become increasingly popular for causal inference. Most existing approaches, however, rely on a causal finite-sample approach or computationally intensive methods, limiting their applicability and external validity. In this paper, we propose a novel method for panel causal inference within a super-population framework, based on…

利用修正向量值处理政策分析机械通气参数的效应AI 解读

Mechanical ventilation is critical for managing respiratory failure, but inappropriate ventilator settings can lead to ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI), increasing patient morbidity and mortality. Evaluating the causal impact of ventilator settings is challenging due to the complex interplay of multiple treatment variables and strong confounding due to ventilator guidelines. In this paper, we propose a modified vector-valued treatment policy (MVTP) framework coupled…

零膨胀混合中介变量的因果中介分析AI 解读

Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical tool to quantify effects transmitted by intermediate variables from a cause to an outcome. There is a gap in mediation analysis methods to handle mixture mediator data that are zero-inflated with multi-modality and atypical behaviors. We propose an innovative way to model zero-inflated mixture mediators from the perspective of finite mixture distributions to flexibly capture such mediator data. Multiple data types are…

最大定向部分有向无环图中的条件因果效应识别AI 解读

We consider identifying a conditional causal effect when a graph is known up to a maximally oriented partially directed acyclic graph (MPDAG). An MPDAG represents an equivalence class of graphs that is restricted by background knowledge and where all variables in the causal model are observed. We provide three results that address identification in this setting: an identification formula when the conditioning set is unaffected by treatment, a generalization of the well-known…

含部分无效代理变量的自适应近端因果推断AI 解读

Proximal causal inference (PCI) is a recently proposed framework to identify and estimate the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome in the presence of hidden confounders, using observed proxies. Specifically, PCI relies on two types of proxies: a treatment-inducing confounding proxy, related to the outcome only through its association with unmeasured confounders (given treatment and covariates), and an outcome-inducing confounding proxy, related to the treatment only…