每日简报

非精确匹配观察研究中平均处理效应的随机化推断AI 解读

Matching is a widely used causal inference design that aims to approximate a randomized experiment using observational data by forming matched sets of treated and control units based on similarities in their covariates. Ideally, treated units are exactly matched with controls on these covariates, enabling randomization-based inference for treatment effects as in a randomized experiment, under the assumption of no unobserved covariates. However, inexact matching often occurs,…

内生性与异方差下删失分位数回归的分布效应AI 解读

Distributional effects, captured by quantile frameworks, are well-received for characterizing heterogeneous impacts of economic factors across the unobserved relative ranks. Censored outcome, endogenous regressor and heteroskedastic error are prevalent in empirical work, yet challenge the consistency of existing quantile estimation methods. This paper proposes a two-nested-step(TNS) estimation method for distributional effects in censored quantile models with endogeneity and…

结果分布偏移下处理效应推广的锐界AI 解读

Generalizing treatment effects from a randomized trial to a target population requires the assumption that potential outcome distributions are invariant across populations after conditioning on observed covariates. This assumption fails when unmeasured effect modifiers are distributed differently between trial participants and the target population. We develop a sensitivity analysis framework that bounds how much conclusions can change when this transportability assumption…

未知因果图上的因果老虎机：结合后门调整的置信上界AI 解读

The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the causal graph is known or impose restrictive structural assumptions. In this paper, we study causal bandit problems when the causal graph is unknown. We first consider Gaussian DAG models without latent confounders. By combining observational…

随机对照试验中存在竞争性伴发事件的处理效应估计AI 解读

The analysis of randomized controlled trials is often complicated by intercurrent events (IEs) -- events that occur after treatment initiation and affect either the interpretation or existence of outcome measurements. Examples include treatment discontinuation or the use of additional medications. In two recent clinical trials for systemic lupus erythematosus with complications of IEs, we classify the IEs into two broad categories: effect-informative (e.g., treatment…

通过基于模拟的推断改进因果评估的生成方法AI 解读

Generating synthetic datasets that accurately reflect real-world observational data is critical for evaluating causal estimators, but it remains a challenging task. Existing generative methods offer a solution by producing synthetic datasets anchored in the observed data (source data) while allowing variation in key parameters such as the treatment effect and amount of confounding bias. However, it is often unclear which generative methods to use and which values of…

因果空间中因果效应的细粒度分析AI 解读

The notion of causal effect is fundamental across many scientific disciplines. Traditionally, quantitative researchers have studied causal effects at the level of variables; for example, how a certain drug dose (W) causally affects a patient's blood pressure (Y). However, in many modern data domains, the raw variables-such as pixels in an image or tokens in a language model-do not have the semantic structure needed to formulate meaningful causal questions. In this paper, we…

贝叶斯层级不变预测AI 解读

We propose Bayesian Hierarchical Invariant Prediction (BHIP) reframing Invariant Causal Prediction (ICP) through the lens of Hierarchical Bayes. We leverage the hierarchical structure to explicitly test invariance of causal mechanisms under heterogeneous data, resulting in improved computational scalability for a larger number of predictors compared to ICP. Moreover, given its Bayesian nature BHIP enables the use of prior information. We evaluate BHIP on both synthetic and…

链式法则下的因果归因：统一自然选择、学习、经济学及其他学科AI 解读

Analysis often splits change into components. For example, how much of the observed variance is caused by genes or environment? In many cases, the split is ultimately made by the logic of the chain rule, which divides the difference of a product into two terms. Each term quantifies the partial difference associated with change in one component while holding the other component constant. The chain rule is of course widely known. However, this article argues that its deep…

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,…

涉及半连续暴露的因果推断：两阶段估计AI 解读

Methods for causal inference are well developed for binary and continuous exposures, but in many settings, the exposure has a substantial mass at zero-such exposures are called semi-continuous. We propose a general causal framework for such semi-continuous exposures, together with a novel two-stage estimation strategy. A two-part propensity structure is introduced for the semi-continuous exposure, with one component for exposure status (exposed vs unexposed) and another for…

结合目标学习推断的在线元层级自适应设计：代理结局的评价与利用AI 解读

Adaptive designs are increasingly used in clinical trials and online experiments to improve participant outcomes by dynamically updating treatment allocation as data accumulate. In practice, experimenters often consider multiple candidate designs, each with distinct trade-offs. However, typically only one design is implemented at a time, leaving benefits and costs of alternative designs unobserved and unquantified. To address this, we propose a novel meta-level adaptive…

非参数倾向得分估计的局部平衡校准AI 解读

The propensity score is widely used for causal inference in observational studies, but common parametric estimators can produce biased and inefficient effect estimates when model assumptions are violated. Nonparametric approaches reduce sensitivity to misspecification but often yield unstable weights and inadequate covariate balance. We propose Local Balance with Calibration, implemented by Neural Networks, a weighting method that combines flexible function approximation…

因果基础模型的干预时间序列先验AI 解读

Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) have emerged as powerful foundation models for tabular causal inference, yet their extension to time series remains limited by the absence of synthetic data generators that provide interventional targets. Existing time series benchmarks generate observational data with ground-truth causal graphs but lack the interventional data required for training causal foundation models. To address this, we propose \textbf{CausalTimePrior}, a principled…

当“无损一般性的规范化”损失一般性AI 解读

Normalization is ubiquitous in economics, and a growing literature shows that ``normalizations'' can matter for interpretation, counterfactual analysis, misspecification, and inference. This paper provides a general framework for these issues, based on the formalized notion of modeling equivalence that partitions the space of unknowns into equivalence classes, and defines normalization as a WLOG selection of one representative from each class. A counterfactual parameter is…

低阶结局交互干扰下的协变量调整与处理效应估计AI 解读

In randomized experiments, covariates are often used to reduce variance and improve the precision of treatment effect estimates. However, in many real-world settings, interference between units, where one unit's treatment affects another's outcome, complicates causal inference. This raises a key question: how can covariates be effectively used in the presence of interference? Addressing this challenge is nontrivial, as direct covariate adjustment, such as through regression,…

级联恒等式：容量约束情境下作为政策参数的 2SLSAI 解读

Governments routinely adjust capacity in rationed programs such as university fields, medical training and public housing, where admitting one individual displaces others and triggers chains of reallocation. We show that in such settings, the standard multi-treatment two-stage least squares (2SLS) coefficient identifies exactly the total societal effect of a marginal expansion, including all downstream reallocations. The result is an algebraic identity: under instrument…

小子群中关键处理效应偏差的检测AI 解读

Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for making informed decisions in medicine, yet they often lack generalizability to the patient populations in clinical practice. Observational studies, on the other hand, cover a broader patient population but are prone to various biases. Thus, before using an observational study for decision-making, it is crucial to benchmark its treatment effect estimates against those derived from a randomized trial. We propose a novel…

尾部不确定性下部分识别处理效应的混合置信带及企业性别多样性应用AI 解读

Manski's nonparametric bounds partially identify the average treatment effects (ATEs) under minimal assumptions, yielding an interval-valued estimand with endpoints that depend on the outcome support - typically treated as known or fixed. In many empirical settings, however, credible bounds on the outcome support are often unavailable and outcomes may be heavy-tailed, so common empirical implementations that rely on ad-hoc truncation or observed extrema can compromise…

利用潜类别选择模型对态度与行为关系进行后验推断AI 解读

The link between attitudes and behaviour has been a key topic in choice modelling for two decades, with the widespread application of ever more complex hybrid choice models. This paper proposes a pragmatic and computationally tractable alternative framework for empirically examining the relationship between attitudes and behaviours using latent class choice models (LCCMs). Rather than embedding attitudinal constructs within the structural model, as in hybrid choice…

可解释 M 学习器框架下的生存分析异质性中介效应AI 解读

Mediation analysis is a useful tool to evaluate surrogate endpoints in clinical trials. We propose a novel method, the M-survival learner, for estimating heterogeneous indirect treatment effects in the presence of censored outcomes. The proposed approach enables the identification of interpretable patient subgroups characterized by distinct mediation pathways. To distinguish heterogeneous from homogeneous mediation effects, we introduce a new statistical criterion…

多弱工具变量高维回归的多任务学习AI 解读

Many weak instrumental variables (IVs) are routinely used in the health and social sciences to improve identification and inference of the treatment effect of interest, along with a broad collection of data on potential confounding factors in the hope that the IV assumptions hold within each data stratum. We propose a new debiased continuous-updating generalized method of moments estimator with multi-task learning of the IV propensity scores to simultaneously address the…

弱重叠条件下的双重稳健估计量AI 解读

Doubly robust (DR) estimators guard against model misspecification but remain sensitive to weak covariate overlap. We show that trimming propensity scores reduces variance but eliminates double robustness. We introduce DR estimators that retain double robustness after trimming through bias correction, preserving the original causal targets across unconfoundedness, instrumental variables, and difference-in-differences designs. In four applications, the proposed estimator…

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…