每日简报

异质性处理效应变量重要性的目标学习AI 解读

Quantifying the heterogeneity of treatment effect is important for understanding how a commercial product or medical treatment affects different population subgroups. While much of treatment effect heterogeneity analysis focuses on the conditional average treatment effect, an alternative parameter that captures treatment effect heterogeneity is the variance of treatment effect across different covariate groups. One can also derive variable importance parameters that measure…

星系天体物理学的因果结构AI 解读

Data-driven astrophysics currently relies on the detection and characterisation of correlations between objects' properties, which are then used to test physical theories that make predictions for them. This process fails to utilise information in the data that forms a crucial part of the theories' predictions, namely which variables are directly correlated (as opposed to accidentally correlated through others), the directions of these determinations, and the presence or…

条件矩等式模型的半参数贝叶斯推断AI 解读

I propose a semiparametric Bayesian inference framework for conditional moment equalities. The core idea is that these models deterministically map a conditional distribution of data to a structural parameter via the restriction that a conditional expectation equals zero. Consequently, a posterior for the conditional distribution leads to a posterior for the structural parameter by minimizing the distance of the conditional moments to zero. The method has similar flexibility…

重新审视胜率比：层级结局分析的因果框架AI 解读

Quantifying causal effects in the presence of complex and multivariate outcomes remains a key challenge in treatment evaluation. For hierarchical multivariate outcomes, the FDA recommends the Win Ratio and Generalized Pairwise Comparisons approaches \citep{Pocock2011winratio,Buyse2010}. However, commonly used estimators can yield treatment recommendations that target a population-level estimand (the probability that a randomly sampled patient under treatment fares better…

多类实验中个体处理效应分布与分位数的改进推断AI 解读

Understanding treatment effect heterogeneity has become increasingly important in many fields. In this paper we study distributions and quantiles of individual treatment effects to provide a more comprehensive and robust understanding of treatment effects beyond usual averages, despite they are more challenging to infer due to nonidentifiability from observed data. Recent randomization-based approaches offer finite-sample valid inference for treatment effect distributions…

通用双重差分的非参数框架AI 解读

Difference-in-differences (DiD) is a popular approach to evaluate treatment effects in settings where both pre- and post-treatment measurements of the outcome are available. Despite its popularity, existing methods face important limitations. Specifically, they either: (i) only apply to continuous outcomes and the average treatment effect on the treated; (ii) are sensitive to the transformation of the outcome; (iii) rely on a no unmeasured confounding assumption given…

利用非高斯性与辅助协变量识别因果效应AI 解读

Assessing causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is challenging. Although auxiliary variables, such as instrumental variables, are commonly used to identify causal effects, they are often unavailable in practice due to stringent and untestable conditions. To address this issue, previous researches have utilized linear structural equation models to show that the causal effect is identifiable when noise variables of the treatment and outcome are both…

面向肥胖遗传变异的超高维数据知识整合分位数回归方法AI 解读

Obesity is widely recognized as a serious and pervasive health concern. We study obesity through body mass index (BMI), which is known to be highly heritable, and identify important genetic risk factors for BMI from hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Framingham Study data. Several challenges arise when using traditional genome-wide association studies (GWAS): (1) They suffer from a low power due to a combination of a limited number of…

利用工具变量评估反事实政策AI 解读

We study settings in which a researcher has an instrumental variable (IV) and seeks to evaluate the effects of a counterfactual policy that alters treatment assignment, such as a directive encouraging randomly assigned judges to release more defendants. We develop a general and computationally tractable framework for computing sharp bounds on the effects of such policies. Our approach does not require the often tenuous IV monotonicity assumption. Moreover, for an important…

测量误差下凹分布函数的推断AI 解读

We propose an estimator of a concave cumulative distribution function under the measurement error model, where the non-negative variables of interest are perturbed by additive independent random noise. The estimator is defined as the least concave majorant on the positive half-line of the deconvolution estimator of the distribution function. We show its uniform consistency and its square root convergence in law in $\ell_\infty(\mathbb R)$. To assess the validity of the…

复合Lp分位数回归、近分位数回归与Oracle模型选择理论AI 解读

In this paper, we consider high-dimensional Lp-quantile regression which only requires a low order moment of the error and is also a natural generalization of the above methods and Lp-regression as well. The loss function of Lp-quantile regression circumvents the non-differentiability of the absolute loss function and the difficulty of the squares loss function requiring the finiteness of error's variance and thus promises excellent properties of Lp-quantile regression.…

随机占优的修正 Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney 检验AI 解读

Given independent samples from two univariate distributions, the one-sided Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney statistic may be used to conduct a rank-based test of first-order stochastic dominance. We broaden the scope of applicability of such tests by showing that the bootstrap may be used to conduct valid inference in a matched pairs sampling framework permitting dependence between the two samples. Further, we show that a modified bootstrap incorporating an implicit estimate of a…

DoFlow：用于时间序列干预与反事实预测的流生成模型AI 解读

Time-series forecasting increasingly demands not only accurate observational predictions but also causal forecasting under interventional and counterfactual queries in multivariate systems. We present DoFlow, a flow-based generative model defined over a causal Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that delivers coherent observational and interventional predictions, as well as counterfactuals through the natural encoding-decoding mechanism of continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). We…

含处理与协变量交互项的两阶段最小二乘及处理效应异质性AI 解读

Treatment effect heterogeneity with respect to covariates is common in instrumental variable (IV) analyses. An intuitive approach, which we call the interacted two-stage least squares (2sls), is to postulate a working linear model of the outcome on the treatment, covariates, and treatment-covariate interactions, and instrument it using the IV, covariates, and IV-covariate interactions. We clarify the causal interpretation of the interacted 2sls under the local average…

利用结局一致配对信息改进条件 Logistic 回归及其软件实现AI 解读

We develop an improvement to conditional logistic regression (CLR) in the setting where the parameter of interest is the additive effect of binary treatment effect on log-odds of the positive level in the binary response. Our improvement is simply to use information learned above the nuisance control covariates found in the concordant response pairs' observations (which is usually discarded) to create an informative prior on their coefficients. This prior is then used in the…

通过设计型市场进行干扰下的因果推断AI 解读

In auction and matching markets, estimating the welfare effects of demand-side treatments is challenging because of spillovers through the mechanism. We develop a quasi-experimental approach that avoids parametric assumptions typically imposed by structural methods. For a class of strategy-proof "cutoff" mechanisms, we propose an estimator that runs a weighted and perturbed version of the mechanism on data from a single market. The estimator is semi-parametrically efficient,…

单位区间分布族的结构性质及其在不平等数据中的应用AI 解读

Probability distributions defined on the unit interval are widely used in fields ranging from econometrics to reliability studies. Traditional models such as the beta and Kumaraswamy distributions are well-established due to their flexibility and tractability. In this paper, we introduce two novel families of unit-interval distributions derived via non-injective transformations of the gamma ratio. These transformations, denoted $S_r$ and $T_r$, allow the construction of new…

一般混杂下线性非高斯因果模型的参数识别AI 解读

Linear non-Gaussian causal models postulate that each random variable is a linear function of parent variables and non-Gaussian exogenous error terms. We study identification of the linear coefficients when such models contain latent variables. Our focus is on the commonly studied acyclic setting, where each model corresponds to a directed acyclic graph (DAG). For this case, prior literature has demonstrated that connections to overcomplete independent component analysis…

量化贸易与空间模型中的测量误差和反事实AI 解读

Counterfactuals in quantitative trade and spatial models are functions of the current state of the world and the model parameters. Common practice treats the current state of the world as perfectly observed, but there is good reason to believe that it is measured with error. This paper provides tools for quantifying uncertainty about counterfactuals when the current state of the world is measured with error. I recommend an empirical Bayes approach to uncertainty…

连续处理的异质性响应：基于聚类的因果框架AI 解读

When treatments are non-randomly assigned, continuous, and yield heterogeneous effects at the same intensity, causal identification becomes particularly challenging. In such contexts, existing approaches often fail to provide policy-relevant estimates of the relationship between treatment intensity and outcomes, especially in the presence of limited common support. To fill this gap, we introduce the Clustered Dose-Response Function (Cl-DRF), a novel estimator designed to…

改进非参数回归与回归不连续设计的统计推断AI 解读

Nonparametric regression and regression-discontinuity designs suffer from smoothing bias that distorts conventional confidence intervals. Solutions based on robust bias correction (RBC) are now central to the economist's toolbox. In this paper, we establish a novel connection between RBC methods and bootstrap prepivoting. Revisiting RBC through the lens of bootstrapping allows us to develop a novel bias correction procedure which delivers improved nonparametric inference.…

双重差分方法的协变量平衡估计与模型选择AI 解读

Remarkable progress has been made in difference-in-differences (DID) approaches to causal inference that estimate the average effect of a treatment on the treated (ATT). Of these, the semiparametric DID (SDID) approach incorporates a propensity score analysis into the DID setup. Supposing that the ATT is a function of covariates, we estimate it by weighting the inverse of the propensity score. In this study, as one way to make the estimation robust to the propensity score…

网络依赖下的 GMM 与 M 估计AI 解读

This paper presents GMM and M estimators and their asymptotic properties for network-dependent data. To this end, I build on Kojevnikov, Marmer, and Song (KMS, 2021) and develop a novel uniform law of large numbers (ULLN), which is essential to ensure desired asymptotic behaviors of nonlinear estimators (e.g., Newey and McFadden, 1994, Section 2). Using this ULLN, I establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of both GMM and M estimators. For practical convenience,…

偏好策略性申报下匹配机制中的因果效应AI 解读

A growing number of authorities use mechanisms to allocate students to schools in a way that reflects student preferences and school priorities. However, most real-world mechanisms incentivize students to strategically misreport their preferences. Misreporting complicates the identification of causal parameters that depend on true preferences, which are necessary inputs for a broad class of counterfactual analyses. We provide an identification approach robust to misreporting…