每日简报

一般网络干扰下能否验证反事实估计？AI 解读

Randomized experiments have become a cornerstone of evidence-based decision-making in contexts ranging from online platforms to public health. However, in experimental settings with network interference, a unit's treatment can influence outcomes of other units, challenging both causal effect estimation and its validation. Classic validation approaches fail as outcomes are only observable under a single treatment scenario and exhibit complex correlation patterns due to…

用于面板数据异常值检测的损失函数AI 解读

The detection of outliers is of critical importance in the assurance of data quality. Outliers may exist in observed data or in data derived from these observed data, such as estimates and forecasts. An outlier may indicate a problem with its data generation process or may simply be a true, but unusual, statement about the world. Without making any distributional assumptions, we proposes the use of loss functions to detect these outliers in panel data. Part I covers…

DR-VIDAL：用于反事实预测与处理效应估计的双重稳健深度生成学习AI 解读

Determining causal effects of interventions onto outcomes from real-world, observational (non-randomized) data, e.g., treatment repurposing using electronic health records, is challenging due to underlying bias. Causal deep learning has improved over traditional techniques for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE). We present the Doubly Robust Variational Information-theoretic Deep Adversarial Learning (DR-VIDAL), a novel generative framework that combines two…

随机对照试验分析中利用外部数据的方法比较AI 解读

The use of patient-level information from previous studies, registries, and other external datasets can support the analysis of single-arm and randomized controlled trials to evaluate and test experimental treatments. However, the integration of external data in the analysis of clinical trials can also compromise the scientific validity of the results due to selection bias, study-to-study differences, unmeasured confounding, and other distortion mechanisms. Therefore,…

学生化中位数的 m-out-of-n 自助估计：中心极限定理与 Edgeworth 展开AI 解读

The m-out-of-n bootstrap, originally proposed by Bickel, Gotze, and Zwet (1992), approximates the distribution of a statistic by repeatedly drawing m subsamples (with m much smaller than n) without replacement from an original sample of size n. It is now routinely used for robust inference with heavy-tailed data, bandwidth selection, and other large-sample applications. Despite its broad applicability across econometrics, biostatistics, and machine learning, rigorous…

利用捕获—再捕获方法改进观察队列中的处理效应评估AI 解读

We extend recently proposed design-based capture-recapture (CRC) methods for prevalence estimation among registry participants, in order to enhance treatment effect evaluation among a trial-eligible target population. The so-called ``anchor stream design" for CRC analysis integrates an observational study cohort with a randomized trial involving a small representative study sample, and enhances the generalizability and transportability of CRC findings. We show that a novel…

分组数据下成分数未知的对数正态混合分布贝叶斯分析AI 解读

This study proposes a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo method for estimating parameters of lognormal distribution mixtures for income. Using simulated data examples, we examined the proposed algorithm's performance and the accuracy of posterior distributions of the Gini coefficients. Results suggest that the parameters were estimated accurately. Therefore, the posterior distributions are close to the true distributions even when the different data generating process…

存在跨簇干扰的整群随机试验AI 解读

The literature on cluster-randomized trials typically allows for interference within but not across clusters. This may be implausible when units are irregularly distributed across space without well-separated communities, as clusters in such cases may not align with significant geographic, social, or economic divisions. This paper develops methods for reducing bias due to cross-cluster interference. We first propose an estimation strategy that excludes units not surrounded…

基于分层的非线性效应工具变量分析框架AI 解读

Nonlinear causal effects are prevalent in many research scenarios involving continuous exposures, and instrumental variables (IVs) can be employed to investigate such effects, particularly in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However, common IV methods for nonlinear effect analysis, such as IV regression or the control-function method, have inherent limitations, leading to either low statistical power or potentially misleading conclusions. In this work, we propose an…

平均斯勒茨基对称性的不可检验性AI 解读

Slutsky symmetry and negative semidefiniteness are necessary and sufficient conditions for the rationality of demand functions. While the empirical implications of Slutsky negative semidefiniteness in repeated cross-sectional demand data are well understood, the empirical content of Slutsky symmetry remains largely unexplored. This paper takes an important first step toward addressing this gap. We show that the average Slutsky matrix is not identified and that its identified…

样本选择下连续处理的 Lee 界限AI 解读

We study causal inference in sample selection models where a continuous or multivalued treatment affects both outcome and their observability (eg., employment or survey response). We generalized the widely used Lee (2009)'s bounds for binary treatment effects. Our key innovation is a sufficient treatment value assumption that imposes weak restrictions on selection heterogeneity and is implicit in separable threshold-crossing models, including monotone effects on selection.…

GST-UNet：处理时变混杂的时空因果推断神经框架AI 解读

Estimating causal effects from spatiotemporal observational data is essential in public health, environmental science, and policy evaluation, where randomized experiments are often infeasible. Existing approaches, however, either rely on strong structural assumptions or fail to handle key challenges such as interference, spatial confounding, temporal carryover, and time-varying confounding -- where covariates are influenced by past treatments and, in turn, affect future…

数字健康干预中的可重复多臂老虎机算法AI 解读

Adaptive treatment assignment algorithms, such as bandit algorithms, are increasingly used in digital health intervention clinical trials. Frequently, the data collected from these trials is used to conduct causal inference and related data analyses to decide how to refine the intervention, and whether to roll-out the intervention more broadly. This work studies inference for estimands that depend on the adaptive algorithm itself; a simple example is the mean reward under…

短面板中的潜在因子分析AI 解读

We develop a pseudo maximum likelihood method for latent factor analysis in short panels without imposing sphericity nor Gaussianity. We derive an asymptotically uniformly most powerful invariant test for the number of factors. On a large panel of monthly U.S. stock returns, we separate month after month systematic and idiosyncratic risks in short subperiods of bear vs. bull market. We observe an uptrend in the paths of total and idiosyncratic volatilities. The systematic…

结合时空建模与惩罚经验似然的预测型因果推断AI 解读

This study introduces an integrated framework for predictive causal inference designed to overcome limitations inherent in conventional single model approaches. Specifically, we combine a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for spatial health state estimation with a Multi Task and Multi Graph Convolutional Network (MTGCN) for capturing temporal outcome trajectories. The framework asymmetrically treats temporal and spatial information regarding them as endogenous variables in the…

无需指定网络结构的同伴效应检验AI 解读

This paper proposes an Anderson-Rubin (AR) test for the presence of peer effects in panel data without the need to specify the network structure. The unrestricted model of our test is a linear panel data model of social interactions with dyad-specific peer effect coefficients for all potential peers. The proposed AR test evaluates if these peer effect coefficients are all zero. As the number of peer effect coefficients increases with the sample size, so does the number of…

尖锐回归折点设计中局部处理效应识别与推断的统一框架AI 解读

This paper develops a unified framework for the identification, estimation, and uniform inference of local treatment effects (LTEs) in sharp regression kink designs (RKDs). These LTEs quantify the effect of a marginal change in the treatment at the kink point on various features of the outcome distribution. The identification strategy applies to Hadamard-differentiable functionals of the outcome distribution -- including means, quantiles, and inequality measures -- and…

随机实验中干扰效应的弱假设刻画AI 解读

We give an approach for characterizing interference by lower bounding the number of units whose outcome depends on selected groups of treated individuals, such as depending on the treatment of others, or others who are at least a certain distance away. The approach is applicable to randomized experiments with binary-valued outcomes. Asymptotically conservative point estimates and one-sided confidence intervals may be constructed with no assumptions beyond the known…

异质地点间因果效应的迁移估计AI 解读

We consider the problem of extrapolating treatment effects across heterogeneous populations (``sites"/``contexts"). We consider an idealized scenario in which the researcher observes cross-sectional data for a large number of units across several ``experimental" sites in which an intervention has already been implemented to a new ``target" site for which a baseline survey of unit-specific, pre-treatment outcomes and relevant attributes is available. Our approach treats the…

利用外部对照改进处理效应估计的自适应数据借用AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) often exhibit limited inferential efficiency in estimating treatment effects due to small sample sizes. In recent years, the combination of external controls has gained increasing attention as a means of improving the efficiency of RCTs. However, external controls are not always comparable to RCTs, and direct borrowing without careful evaluation can introduce substantial bias and reduce the efficiency of treatment effect estimation. In…

链接部分可观测的团队网络AI 解读

This paper studies a linear production model in team networks with missing links. In the model, heterogeneous workers, represented as nodes, produce jointly and repeatedly within teams, represented as links. Links are omitted when their associated outcome variables fall below a threshold, resulting in partial observability of the network. To address this, I propose a Generalized Method of Moments estimator under normally distributed errors and develop a distribution-free…

多阶段分层抽样与学生未参与下国际大型测评平均成绩的部分识别AI 解读

International large-scale assessment (ILSA) studies collect information across education systems with the objective of learning about the population-wide distribution of student achievement in the assessment. In this article, we study one of the most fundamental threats that these studies face when justifying the conclusions reached about these distributions: the identification problem that arises from student non-participation during data collection. Recognizing that ILSA…

条件密度估计的降维及其在高维因果推断中的应用AI 解读

We propose a novel and computationally efficient approach for nonparametric conditional density estimation in high-dimensional settings that achieves dimension reduction without imposing restrictive distributional or functional form assumptions. To uncover the underlying sparsity structure of the data, we develop an innovative conditional dependence measure and a modified cross-validation procedure that enables data-driven variable selection, thereby circumventing the need…

从单项研究识别与估计潜在结果的联合分布AI 解读

Most causal inference methods focus on estimating marginal average treatment effects, but many important causal estimands depend on the joint distribution of potential outcomes, including the probability of causation and proportions benefiting from or harmed by treatment. Wu et al (2025) recently established nonparametric identification of this joint distribution for categorical outcomes under binary treatment by leveraging variation across multiple studies. We demonstrate…