每日简报

考虑激励的合成控制：通过激励探索准确估计反事实AI 解读

Synthetic control methods (SCMs) are a canonical approach used to estimate treatment effects from panel data in the internet economy. We shed light on a frequently overlooked but ubiquitous assumption made in SCMs of "overlap": a treated unit can be written as some combination -- typically, convex or linear -- of the units that remain under control. We show that if units select their own interventions, and there is sufficiently large heterogeneity between units that prefer…

利用干预数据刻画并学习含潜在混杂与处理后选择的因果图AI 解读

Interventional causal discovery seeks to identify causal relations by leveraging distributional changes introduced by interventions, even in the presence of latent confounders. Beyond the spurious dependencies induced by latent confounders, we highlight a common yet often overlooked challenge in the problem due to post-treatment selection, in which samples are selectively included in datasets after interventions. This fundamental challenge widely exists in biological…

匹配观察研究敏感性分析中可观测偏差与隐藏偏差的协调AI 解读

Matching is one of the most widely used causal inference designs in observational studies, but post-matching confounding bias remains a critical concern. This bias includes overt bias from inexact matching on measured confounders and hidden bias from unmeasured confounders. Researchers routinely apply the famous Rosenbaum-type sensitivity analysis after matching to assess the impact of these biases on causal conclusions. In this work, we show that this approach is often…

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…

加权估计敏感性模型中混杂强度的校准：比较综述与新方法AI 解读

Causal inference is only valid when its underlying assumptions are satisfied, one of the most central being the ignorability or unconfoundedness assumption. However, this hypothesis is often unrealistic in observational studies, as some confounding variables may remain unobserved. To address this limitation, sensitivity models for Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) estimators, known as Marginal Sensitivity Models, have been introduced, allowing for a controlled relaxation…

没有工具变量时的边际处理效应AI 解读

We propose a method for defining, identifying, and estimating the marginal treatment effect (MTE) without imposing the instrumental variable (IV) assumptions of independence, exclusion, and separability (or monotonicity). Under a new definition of the MTE based on reduced-form treatment error that is statistically independent of the covariates, we find that the relationship between the MTE and standard treatment parameters holds in the absence of IVs. We provide a set of…

拥抱离散搜索：因果结构学习的一种可行方法AI 解读

We present FLOP (Fast Learning of Order and Parents), a score-based causal discovery algorithm for linear models. It pairs fast parent selection with iterative Cholesky-based score updates, cutting run-times over prior algorithms. This makes it feasible to fully embrace discrete search, enabling iterated local search with principled order initialization to find graphs with scores at or close to the global optimum. The resulting structures are highly accurate across…

利用潜因子模型的个体化动态中介分析AI 解读

Mediation analysis plays a crucial role in causal inference as it can investigate the pathways through which treatment influences outcome. Most existing mediation analysis assumes that mediation effects are static and homogeneous within populations. However, mediation effects usually change over time and exhibit significant heterogeneity among individuals in many real-world applications. Additionally, the mediation mechanism can be complicated and involves non-sparse, making…

用于因果中介与溢出效应的网络结构方程模型AI 解读

Social network interference induces complex dependencies where a unit's outcome is influenced not only by its own exposure and mediator but also by those of connected neighbors. In such settings, a significant challenge lies in distinguishing direct exposure effects from interference-driven spillover effects, and further separating these from indirect effects mediated by intermediate variables. To address this, we propose a theoretical framework utilizing structural…

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…

连续治疗因果效应的共形预测AI 解读

Uncertainty quantification of causal effects is crucial for safety-critical applications such as personalized medicine. A powerful approach for this is conformal prediction, which has several practical benefits due to model-agnostic finite-sample guarantees. Yet, existing methods for conformal prediction of causal effects are limited to binary/discrete treatments and make highly restrictive assumptions such as known propensity scores. In this work, we provide a novel…

利用潜在干扰网络代理进行因果效应的贝叶斯估计AI 解读

Network interference occurs when treatments assigned to some units affect the outcomes of others. Traditional approaches often assume that the observed network correctly specifies the interference structure. However, in practice, researchers frequently only have access to proxy measurements of the interference network due to limitations in data collection or potential mismatches between measured networks and actual interference pathways. In this paper, we introduce a…

调查观察研究中倾向得分加权的规范实践AI 解读

Propensity score weighting is a common method for estimating treatment effects with survey data. The method is applied to minimize confounding using measured covariates that are often different between individuals in treatment and control. However, existing literature does not reach a consensus on the optimal use of survey weights for population-level inference in the propensity score weighting analysis. Under the balancing weights framework, we provided a unified solution…

加权受控直接效应非参数估计的最优调整集AI 解读

The weighted controlled direct effect (WCDE) generalizes the standard controlled direct effect (CDE) by averaging over the mediator distribution, providing a robust estimate when treatment effects vary across mediator levels. This makes the WCDE especially relevant in fairness analysis, where it isolates the direct effect of an exposure on an outcome, independent of mediating pathways. This work establishes three fundamental advances for WCDE in observational studies: First,…

随机试验中 Rosenbaum 秩估计量的稳健性与效率：设计视角AI 解读

Mean-based estimators of causal effects in randomized experiments may behave poorly if the potential outcomes have a heavy tail or contain outliers. An alternative estimator proposed by Rosenbaum (1993) estimates a constant additive treatment effect by inverting a randomization test using ranks. We develop a design-based asymptotic theory for this rank-based estimator and study its robustness and efficiency properties. We show that Rosenbaum's estimator is robust against…

升价拍卖中卖方风险厌恶的识别与估计AI 解读

This paper shows how to identify and estimate the seller's risk parameter in an ascending auction. We consider a semiparametric model where the seller has a parametric utility function (such as CARA or CRRA) and the distribution of bidder valuations is modeled flexibly. We provide primitive conditions under which the risk parameter is identified and show that it can be consistently estimated with an asymptotically normal limiting distribution under standard regularity…

多元因果效应：贝叶斯因果回归因子模型AI 解读

The impact of wildfire smoke on air quality is a growing concern, contributing to air pollution through a complex mixture of chemical species with important implications for public health. While previous studies have primarily focused on its association with total particulate matter (PM2.5), the causal relationship between wildfire smoke and the chemical composition of PM2.5 remains largely unexplored. Exposure to these chemical mixtures plays a critical role in shaping…

通过元学习估计因果图不确定时的干预分布AI 解读

In scientific domains -- from biology to the social sciences -- many questions boil down to \textit{What effect will we observe if we intervene on a particular variable?} If the causal relationships (e.g.~a causal graph) are known, it is possible to estimate the intervention distributions. In the absence of this domain knowledge, the causal structure must be discovered from the available observational data. However, observational data are often compatible with multiple…

因果推断中系统识别与联合分析多重偏差的路线图AI 解读

Observational studies examining causal effects rely on unverifiable assumptions, the violation of which can induce multiple biases. Quantitative bias analysis (QBA) methods examine the sensitivity of findings to such violations, generally, by producing estimates under alternative assumptions, incorporating external information. Although substantial guidance exists for implementing QBA, there is limited guidance on how to systematically determine the assumptions underlying a…

外部对照单臂试验与非锚定间接治疗比较的双重稳健增广加权估计AI 解读

Externally controlled single-arm trials are critical to assess treatment efficacy across therapeutic indications for which randomized controlled trials are not feasible. A closely-related research design, the unanchored indirect treatment comparison, is often required for disconnected treatment networks in health technology assessment. We present a unified causal inference framework for both research designs. We develop a novel estimator that augments a popular weighting…

早期临床试验中兼顾风险的情境多臂老虎机AI 解读

Early-phase clinical trials face the challenge of selecting optimal drug doses that balance safety and efficacy due to uncertain dose-response relationships and varied participant characteristics. Traditional randomized dose allocation often exposes participants to sub-optimal doses by not considering individual covariates, necessitating larger sample sizes and prolonging drug development. This paper introduces a risk-inclusive contextual bandit algorithm that utilizes…

未测混杂与干扰并存时的空间因果推断AI 解读

This manuscript unites causal inference and spatial statistics, presenting novel insights for causal inference in spatial data analysis, and drawing from tools in spatial statistics to estimate causal effects. We introduce spatial causal graphs to highlight that spatial confounding and interference can be entangled, in that investigating the presence of one can lead to wrongful conclusions in the presence of the other. Moreover, we show that spatial dependence in the…

断点回归效应及其外部有效性的联合推断AI 解读

The external validity of regression discontinuity designs is crucial for informing policy but is rarely examined in applied work. To advance empirical practice, we propose a joint inference procedure for the treatment effect and its local external validity, captured by the treatment effect derivative (TED), within a robust bias correction framework. We further introduce a locally linear treatment effects assumption, which extends the scope of the TED and enables…

面板因果模型中未测混杂的识别诊断：两阶段 LM–Wald 方法AI 解读

Panel data are widely used in political science to draw causal inferences. However, these models often rely on the strong and untested assumption of sequential ignorability--that no unmeasured variables influence both the independent and outcome variables across time. Grounded in psychometric literature on latent variable modeling, this paper introduces the Two-Stage LM-Wald (2SLW) approach, a diagnostic tool that extends the Lagrange Multiplier (LM) and Wald tests to detect…