每日简报

以层次聚类缓解观察性因果推断中的多重共线性AI 解读

Multicollinearity is a long lasting challenge in observational causal inference, especially in regressions -- highly correlated independent variables make it hard to isolate their individual impacts on outcomes of interest. While common solutions such as shrinkage estimators and principal component regressions are helpful in prediction problems, a crucial limitation hinders their applicability to causal inference problems -- they cannot provide the original causal…

利用辅助外部数据识别治疗受益者的共形筛选框架AI 解读

Identifying patients who are likely to benefit from a treatment is central to precision medicine and can guide follow-up trials, enrichment designs, and individualized decisions. Although randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide evidence on efficacy, they are usually powered to estimate average treatment effects rather than patient-level benefit. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods offer flexible tools for estimating heterogeneous treatment…

数字孪生的相似性预测：面板数据、理论与应用AI 解读

Prediction from sequential panel data is central to digital-twin modeling, where new panels arrive over time and the predictive system is updated sequentially. Existing methods often rely on temporal proximity, which can fail when similar input-output patterns recur at nonadjacent times or when recent panels differ from the target panel. We propose State-Local Prediction (StaLoP), a nonparametric dynamic panel prediction framework that utilizes information through…

基于经验分位数的估计量的渐近性质AI 解读

We consider inference for parameters of the form $θ_0 = E[F_Y^{-1}\circ F_Z(X)]$ for some variables $X$, $Y$ and $Z$. Such parameters appear, in particular, in the ``changes-in-changes'' model of \cite{AtheyImbens2006}. We first establish that $\widehatθ$, a plug-in estimator of $θ_0$, is root-$n$ consistent and asymptotically normal under weaker conditions than those previously available, allowing in particular for unbounded variables. Next, we propose a new estimator of…

面向全体人群的因果推断：死亡截断结局的边际估计目标AI 解读

In longitudinal studies, outcomes of interest are often truncated by death, meaning that they are only observed or well-defined conditional on intercurrent events such as survival. Existing strategies face a trade-off: causally interpretable estimands, such as survivor average causal effects, target a latent subgroup, whereas while-alive and composite summaries apply to the full population but are difficult to interpret as causal effects on the non-mortality outcome. We…

序贯实验的半参数效率：基于平均倾向得分的刻画与设计AI 解读

Modern experiments, including evaluations of AI-enabled services and platform interventions, often depart from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) sampling because assignments may be adaptive, balanced across covariates, or subject to rollout constraints such as exposure, fairness, and budget limits. This paper studies the efficiency benchmark for estimating causal targets in such sequential experiments. We show that every non-anticipating design induces an…

测量误差诱发的混杂AI 解读

A critical assumption of observational studies is that all confounding variables must be known and sufficiently adjusted for to estimate causal effects. An implicit, and often overlooked, aspect of this assumption is that all confounding variables have been measured without error. In the social and medical sciences, latent traits such as motivation, self-efficacy, and ability measures are likely confounding variables. Because latent traits are not directly observable,…

样本个体数为一时的实验设计AI 解读

N-of-1 trials, or time-series experiments, are widely used in clinical research and online platforms. Yet the theoretically optimal design for estimating many treatment effects remains unclear. We propose a simple Markovian framework for experimental design in which the treatment assignment process is governed by possibly time-varying transition matrices. This formulation encompasses many existing N-of-1 designs and provides a principled way to control temporal dependence in…

具有设计型方差的交叉拟合调查加权 TMLEAI 解读

Cross-fitting is not a refinement of survey-weighted causal machine learning but, once the nuisances are flexible, what restores valid inference. We study the population average treatment effect under a stratified multistage design, estimated by a survey-aware targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) whose variance is obtained by Taylor-series linearization of the influence function, treating the primary sampling unit as the replication unit. Our central result is that…

因果估计中的两层不稳定性AI 解读

There is a precise sense in which drawing causal inferences from observational data is hard, even when identifiability is assumed. In particular, Robins and Ritov (1997) and Robins et al. (2003) showed that causal effects can be discontinuous as a function of the data distribution: two arbitrarily close data distributions might correspond to different causal effects. This is a fact independent of the choice of estimator; however, not all estimators are equally unstable. Our…

主分层下异质性处理效应的双重交叉拟合去偏机器学习AI 解读

Principal stratification provides a foundational framework for causal inference with intermediate outcomes by defining causal effects within subpopulations, yet existing work has largely focused on average effects across strata rather than treatment effect heterogeneity within strata. Such within-stratum heterogeneity informs individualized treatment decisions but the associated methods are sparse. We address this gap by studying the identification and estimation of the…

利用处理后变量研究预测性处理效应异质性的经验分层AI 解读

Post-treatment variables (PVs), such as intercurrent events, treatment noncompliance, and behavioral responses to treatment, provide information about individuals' post-treatment responses and may help characterize heterogeneity in treatment effects on the primary outcome. This paper develops an empirical stratification framework to study the treatment effect heterogeneity across baseline-predicted PV response profiles. Specifically, we construct empirical scores from…

多个误分类暴露的因果推断：控制变量调整的校准加权方法AI 解读

Exposure misclassification is a common issue prevalent in studies of respiratory infections in cystic fibrosis. Throat swabs are frequently used in place of expectorated or induced sputum cultures, although they have imperfect sensitivity and specificity to detect Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus. We develop calibration weighting and control variate estimators for causal inference with multiple misclassified binary exposures and clustered observations. The…

无穷小因果性AI 解读

Interventions can be varied continuously in many causal models. Differentiating a specified smooth intervention protocol produces vector fields on a statistical model, and their Lie brackets describe the noncommutativity of the corresponding local perturbations. We formulate this differential geometry of interventions on smooth statistical models and call the resulting framework infinitesimal causality (IC). Given a constant-rank distribution spanned by visible intervention…

超越错位实施双重差分的平行趋势：高阶平行性下的识别AI 解读

In difference-in-differences designs, the parallel trends assumption requires that the outcome gap between treated and control units would have remained flat absent treatment. Pre-treatment event studies frequently reject this flat-gap requirement. Existing responses include parametric trend controls and bounds on the treatment effect under assumptions about the magnitude of the violation. This paper shows that point identification of cohort-specific and aggregate treatment…

以历史选择作为实际考虑集的 Logit 模型一致估计AI 解读

A key challenge in choice modeling lies in specifying the consideration set, the subset of alternatives that individuals actually evaluate when making choices, which is unobserved (latent) to the researcher. The classical homo economicus assumption posits that individuals assess the full universal set of alternatives, a behaviorally implausible premise. Practical options include directly asking individuals, which introduces behavioral biases; treating the consideration set…

线性结构方程模型半 trek 估计量的半参数推断AI 解读

Linear structural equation models on directed mixed graphs encode causal relationships among variables subject to latent confounding. The half-trek criterion (HTC) provides a graphical sufficient condition for the structural coefficients to be rationally identifiable from the observable covariance matrix, and yields a corresponding closed-form rational estimator. Despite this, the asymptotic distribution of the HTC estimator, and hence valid standard errors and confidence…

用于观察研究因果推断的 CP 图AI 解读

Under the canonical setting of observational studies for causal inference, we derive a set of exact representations for pairwise differences among weighted average treatment effects as covariances between the conditional average treatment effect and the propensity score, up to positive scaling factors. These covariance representations bridge the two core concepts in causal inference with observational studies. They immediately imply that (i) the average treatment effect is…

从控制到处理：超越已观测面板的因果预测AI 解读

Conventional panel data methods recover retrospective counterfactuals within the observed horizon. Many policy decisions, however, are prospective: how would an untreated unit evolve beyond the observed panel under an intervention it has not previously experienced? We develop a causal forecasting framework that combines the counterfactual logic of synthetic controls with multivariate time-series extrapolation. Under a latent factor model, we impose low-rank structure on the…

一步结果插补：多重插补的替代方法AI 解读

Missing outcomes in randomized controlled trials are often handled by multiple imputation (MI). Rubin's rules are routinely used to estimate standard errors but can fail to provide valid standard error estimates for some commonly used procedures, such as reference-based imputation. We propose a one-step alternative by explicitly targeting the treatment effect implied by a given imputation model and constructing an efficient one-step estimator for that treatment effect via…

图依赖经验过程的耦合与最大不等式AI 解读

We develop maximal inequalities for empirical processes indexed by graph-dependent observations. Our bounds separate the complexity of the indexing class from two features specific to graph dependence: the geometry of the underlying graph and the cost of coupling graph-separated blocks to independent copies. The coupling construction combines a novel graph-adapted dependence coefficient with a coloring of a block partition. As an application, we derive Glivenko--Cantelli…

遗漏协变量的比例风险模型内生选择偏差：模拟证据与替代方法AI 解读

In time-to-event analysis, the hazard ratio (HR) derived from the Cox proportional hazards (PH) model is the most commonly used and widely reported measure for assessing treatment effects. However, hazard ratios are non-collapsible due to their inherent conditioning on survival up to each time point. As a result, they are subject to built-in selection bias in the presence of unmeasured heterogeneity arising from omitted important covariates, even when these covariates are…

利用因子模型进行因果推断AI 解读

We develop a factor-model framework for causal inference in panels with policy interventions. Treatment effects are represented as structural changes in treated units' exposure to latent common shocks and, in extensions, changes in the factor process itself. The approach does not impose the standard parallel-trends restriction, accommodates one or many treated units, and targets systematic effects when unit-time idiosyncratic effects are not point identified. We provide…

协变量条件平行趋势下的双重差分AI 解读

We consider difference-in-differences identification and estimation strategies when the parallel trends assumption holds conditional on covariates, which can be time-varying, time-invariant, or both. We uncover several weaknesses of two-way fixed effects (TWFE) regressions in this context. The most important, which we call \textit{hidden linearity bias}, arises because transformations that eliminate unit fixed effects also transform the covariates, either implicitly changing…