每日简报

具有飞轮效应的分享诱导参与度因果估计AI 解读

Sustainable user growth in online platforms depends not only on acquiring new users but also on reactivating and engaging existing ones through social sharing features. A well-designed sharing feature can trigger a self-reinforcing ``flywheel effect'': reactivated users become potential sharers whose engagement propagates through the network over multiple rounds, amplifying total engagement. Measuring the causal impact of such sharing features is challenging, as their…

马尔可夫交替实验中经校准的期限加权局部投影设计AI 解读

We study temporal assignment design for Markov switchback experiments when the reported object is a dynamic local-projection target. We develop a calibrated selector that chooses the feasible persistence minimizing the covariance, HAC, residual-bootstrap, or realized-schedule risk of the estimator and reporting object specified before the experiment. A balanced homoskedastic Markov benchmark yields a closed form because the lagged-assignment information matrix is…

处理效应异质性的正交积分条件矩检验AI 解读

We propose a nonparametric integrated conditional moment (ICM) test for treatment effect heterogeneity across subpopulations defined by a given covariate subvector. Under unconfoundedness, the null is recast as a conditional moment restriction based on a Neyman-orthogonal score, which reduces the first-order sensitivity of the empirical process to nuisance parameter estimation. The test statistics are constructed as continuous functionals of a marked empirical process. We…

MixCIT：面向混合类型数据的核局部多项式去偏条件独立检验AI 解读

Conditional independence testing (CIT) is fundamental to modern statistical inference in areas related to causal discovery and variable selection. While marginal independence is relatively well-understood, despite multiple advances, no existing non-parametric CIT provides a unified, efficient, and statistically guaranteed solution across heterogeneous data. We introduce a graph-based test statistic comparing kernel similarities of the response within composite neighborhoods…

部分干扰下的高阶溢出效应AI 解读

Interference, under which a unit's outcome is affected by the treatment of other units through network connections, is often present when units interact on a network. When the network of interactions is measured, researchers are often interested in the spillover effect from first-order neighbors. When this is the case, the prevailing approach often involves the neighborhood interference assumption, which is oftentimes overly restrictive. In this paper, we instead rely on a…

显著性优先分裂：协调处理效应异质性检测与诚实估计AI 解读

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (CATE) requires simultaneously detecting effect modification and quantifying estimation uncertainty. Existing tree-based methods make an uneasy trade-off: significance-based approaches (Radcliffe and Surry 2011) identify subgroup interactions directly but lack valid inference; honest causal trees (Athey and Imbens 2016) deliver nominal confidence interval coverage but use outcome-agnostic splitting criteria that sacrifice…

聚类处理分配下的遗漏变量偏差敏感性分析AI 解读

Cinelli and Hazlett (2020) develops a sensitivity analysis method for the linear regression model that parameterizes omitted variable bias in terms of two partial $R^2$ parameters capturing the residual variation explained by an omitted confounder in the treatment and outcome respectively. This method is often applied to regressions fit to unit-level data when treatment is assigned at a higher level of aggregation -- as in clustered observational designs. This paper shows…

利用高维工具变量筛选估计潜在双重网络并开展推断AI 解读

We develop a novel methodology for estimation and inference in high-dimensional panel network models with latent dual structures. The framework allows outcomes to be affected simultaneously by positive and negative interaction channels, accommodating settings in which some interactions reinforce outcomes while others generate competition and displacement effects. The proposed method identifies and estimates the network directly from the structural model using observed data…

干预分布公式的验证AI 解读

We formalize verification in causal graphical models: deciding whether a given observational formula identifies a target interventional distribution. This opens a problem complementary to identification, asking not whether any identifying formula exists, but whether the given formula is identifying. We show that even sound and complete solutions to identification do not solve verification. We propose a falsifier as a first practical route forward, prove that it induces an…

处理状态缺失时，如何学习应该干预谁AI 解读

Policy learning methods are increasingly used to inform treatment allocation under budget constraints. Most proposed methods assume complete treatment data, yet applications frequently suffer from missingness that can bias estimates and lead to suboptimal policies. We address this gap by extending efficient estimators for average treatment effect (ATE) estimation to policy value and conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation under missing at random (MAR) and…

单调处理响应下，处理效应超过给定阈值的概率AI 解读

Experiments may, by design, prevent one from observing on a single subject both the response to a treatment and to its absence. Because of this, marginal distributions for both cases may be observable but not their joint distribution, thus obscuring the distribution of the treatment effect. We examine the case where we impose that the treatment effect is nonnegative, also called monotone treatment response, a common assumption relevant to many practical applications. We…

B-CALM：协变量不匹配下以随机试验为锚的偏差受限贝叶斯信息借用AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) identify treatment effects in the randomized trial population but are often too small for reliable heterogeneity estimation; observational studies (OS) are larger but confounded and measured on only partially overlapping covariates. We develop Bayesian Calibrated ALignment under covariate Mismatch (B-CALM), a Bayesian borrowing method for RCT-defined conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. B-CALM maps source-specific…

种族的哪一种效应？不固定其他特征的因果推断AI 解读

Empirical studies of racial discrimination vary race while holding nonracial traits fixed, a design the literature defends as what credible inference requires. This defense bundles two claims: which effect of race a study should target, and whether its design can recover that effect. I separate them. The same randomization that secures credible estimation and inference recovers a family of race estimands, from the all-else-equal effect to a within-race effect that lets…

Mendelian randomization (MR) infers causal effects of exposures on outcomes using genetic variants as instrumental variables, but existing methods remain vulnerable to bias and loss of power when instruments are invalid. We hypothesize that closely related outcome traits share a large overlap in their valid instruments for a given exposure, so that borrowing instruments across such traits can yield more robust MR inference. To operationalize this, we introduce a novel…

用于个体化治疗规则的结局加权学习神经网络AI 解读

Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) formalize precision medicine by assigning treatments according to patient covariates, with the goal of maximizing expected clinical outcomes. Such rules are especially important when treatment effects vary across patients, as in chronic diseases where demographic, clinical, genetic, imaging, or biomarker information may modify the relative benefits of available therapies. Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) formalize precision medicine…

采用斜对称归一化的广义重参数化变分贝叶斯AI 解读

Bayesian hierarchical models with high-dimensional latent structure require scalable posterior approximations that preserve key dependencies while remaining computationally tractable. Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is efficient, but can be unreliable when local variables are strongly correlated or tightly coupled to global variables. We propose KNorm-RVB, a generalized reparametrized variational Bayes framework for latent Gaussian and latent non-Gaussian models with…

因果异质性的分辨率AI 解读

Causal subgroup analyses often report a small number of groups summarizing treatment effect heterogeneity, as if that number were a well-defined estimand. Outside genuinely latent class populations, however, a ``true'' subgroup count is model dependent rather than a population functional. We replace it with a new population estimand, the resolution profile, a functional of the causal feature law giving the fewest groups explaining a prescribed fraction of causal…

基于方差的治疗效应异质性检验AI 解读

This paper proposes a robust nonparametric hypothesis test for the existence of heterogeneous treatment effects. We focus on the variance of the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) as a natural omnibus parameter, where a non-zero variance implies the presence of relevant heterogeneity. Standard inference for this parameter faces a fundamental theoretical challenge. On one hand, evaluating variance components on the same sample leads to null degeneracy, where the…

用于离散选择估计的表格基础模型AI 解读

Tabular foundation models (TFMs) generate predictions on structured data via in-context learning, without task-specific estimation. We ask whether TFMs can be effectively applied to discrete choice, a central demand estimation framework in marketing and operations, and find that directly applying TFMs yields limited performance. The gap is structural: TFMs assume row-independent observations, whereas discrete choice is inherently set-valued and subject to persistent consumer…

时变混杂下平均处理效应估计的缺失数据方法比较AI 解读

Missing data and confounding are common in real-world statistical applications, yet few studies have examined how imputation methods perform under time-varying confounding in binary variables, or how missingness mechanism, missing rate, missingness location and sample size jointly affect performance and the underlying identifiability conditions. We generated synthetic data and conducted a simulation study comparing missing data methods across scenarios varying these factors.…

向量检索作为最近邻匹配：因果推断中的 RAG 政策学习AI 解读

We propose one-step and two-step methods for policy learning with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We formulate RAG-based action selection under the potential outcome framework. In the two-step method, vector search retrieves action-specific neighboring evidence in an embedding space, the generator estimates conditional expected outcomes or their contrasts, and a plug-in rule selects an action. This formulation connects action-specific vector search with…

不规则时间序列的因果发现AI 解读

Causal discovery methods have shown strong performance in temporal systems, but they typically rely on regular and discrete lag structures, limiting their applicability to regularly sampled data. However, many real-world tasks require dealing with irregularly sampled streams of events, such as sensor streams, healthcare data, and financial transactions. In this work, we propose an extension of PCMCI+, a state-of-the-art method for causal discovery on regular multivariate…

两样本孟德尔随机化的自适应惩罚与自助平滑推断AI 解读

Two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to estimate causal effects from observational data using summary association statistics. However, horizontal pleiotropy can invalidate standard MR estimators and lead to biased causal inference. Pleiotropy-robust methods have been proposed to address this issue, including regularization-based approaches such as MR-Lasso. However, MR-Lasso may fail to identify invalid instruments…

因果治愈模型的贝叶斯方法AI 解读

Time-to-event data often include individuals who will never experience the failure event, and are therefore considered cured. In such settings, frequently encountered in clinical research, a substantial proportion of patients may remain event-free throughout the observation period, leading to the appearance of a survival plateau that is commonly interpreted as evidence of a cured fraction. Analysing such data requires inference on the cure fraction and on the survival…