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This paper presents a causal decision framework for list-price elasticities in intermediated retail channels, where estimates are confounded by promotions, competitor moves and shopkeeper pass-through. Rather than forcing a number when the evidence is ambiguous, the system treats abstention (Wait) as an active diagnostic output. Built on Double Machine Learning and conformal prediction, it evaluates whether conditions exist to act on a recommended price or whether…

预期高安慰剂反应时安慰剂对照随机试验的因果效应估计AI 解读

In placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials (RCTs), the placebo response significantly modifies treatment effects and diminishes the intention-to-treat (ITT) treatment effect, $Δ_{ITT}$. This study presents a novel two-stage framework for estimating the standardized causal treatment effect, $Δ_{STD}$, among the ITT population, under the assumption that their placebo responses are similar to the levels of self-administering medication at home. The first stage employs a…

Two frequent approaches for identifying structural VARs are external instruments, which carry economic content but are often weak, and non-Gaussianity of the shocks, which provides statistical identification but carries no economic meaning. We combine the two strategies in a single generalized method of moments framework. This hybrid approach point-identifies the target shocks while also identifying the non-target shocks up to sign and ordering. Under suitable rank…

每个站点样本较少的多站点随机实验中治疗效应异质性的估计AI 解读

Multi-site randomized experiments, which are common in economics and medicine, can reveal how treatment effects vary across settings. However, differences between site-specific estimates reflect both treatment-effect heterogeneity and estimation noise. We build on established measurement-error corrections and develop new ones to study this heterogeneity in experiments with many sites and few units per site. In particular, our results can be used to estimate the variance and…

共同相关效应动态面板模型的自助法推断AI 解读

We study recursive-design wild bootstrap inference for dynamic panel data models with unobserved common factors estimated by Common Correlated Effects. In the large N,T setting, the bootstrap reproduces the biased limiting distribution in pure autoregressive models, but fails to capture all bias and factor-estimation variance components in models with additional regressors, particularly under weak exogeneity. We trace this failure to holding regressors fixed across bootstrap…

高维因果外推中的风险校准平衡AI 解读

In observational causal inference, covariate balancing is widely used to reduce source-target covariate shift, but under weak overlap in high dimensions, stronger balance can induce concentrated weights and increase variance. Balance measures how well the target covariate distribution is represented, but does not by itself determine how reliably the counterfactual mean can be estimated. We develop risk-calibrated balancing for the average treatment effect on the treated,…

Comparing dependence structures between two related multivariate time series is of fundamental interest in many scientific applications, where changes may occur in both directed temporal interactions and contemporaneous connectivity. Modeling each time series by a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, we propose a new framework for estimation and inference of differential Granger causality (DiffGC) and differential network (DiffNet) structures in high dimensions. The proposed…

Experiments with spillovers create incentives for strategic behavior: when one household member's treatment can affect another, take-up decisions become interdependent. We propose an instrumental-variables framework grounded in game theory, in which take-up is a Nash equilibrium among a small number of agents, and all variables are discrete. Under minimal assumptions, without specifying how equilibria are selected, we derive sharp non-parametric bounds for direct, indirect,…

二元结果混合对照试验的稳健估计与推断：非小细胞肺癌案例AI 解读

Hybrid controlled trials (HCTs), which augment randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with external controls (ECs), are increasingly receiving attention as a way to address limited power, slow accrual, and ethical concerns in clinical research. However, borrowing from ECs raises critical statistical challenges in estimation and inference, especially for binary outcomes where hidden bias is harder to detect and estimands such as risk difference, risk ratio, and odds ratio are of…

Factor models for longitudinal data, where policy adoption is unconfounded with respect to a low-dimensional set of latent factor loadings, have become increasingly popular for causal inference. Most existing approaches, however, rely on a causal finite-sample approach or computationally intensive methods, limiting their applicability and external validity. In this paper, we propose a novel method for panel causal inference within a super-population framework, based on…

Traditional machine learning relies on explicit models and domain assumptions, often limiting flexibility and interpretability. We introduce a "model-free" framework of instance-based learning using surprisal (information theoretic uncertainty) to directly analyze and perform inferences from raw data, eliminating distribution modeling, reducing bias, and enabling efficient updates including direct edits and deletion of training data. By quantifying relevance through…

Extrapolating treatment effects from related studies is a promising strategy for designing and analyzing clinical trials in situations where achieving an adequate sample size is challenging. Bayesian methods are well-suited for this purpose, as they enable the synthesis of prior information through the use of prior distributions. While the operating characteristics of Bayesian approaches for borrowing data from control arms have been extensively studied, methods that borrow…

We develop a semiparametric continuous time inferential framework for testing cumulative treatment effects, including both immediate and carryover effects. The latent state process is modeled by an ordinary differential equation (ODE) whose drift depends on state and treatment, while the observed data are noisy measurements of this latent state at irregular, multi resolution time points. We define the average treatment effect (ATE) as the difference of expected cumulative…

稀疏依赖下二元配置概率的对抗估计AI 解读

We consider the problem of estimating binary configuration probabilities, which is common in operations management applications, including product bundling, advertising, etc. Existing approaches typically model each assortment as a category and apply multinomial models to estimate the choice probabilities; while computationally convenient, these methods do not exploit independence structures in the joint distribution and may therefore be statistically inefficient when the…

短时间维度异质性面板中的平均效应估计AI 解读

The commonly used two-way fixed effects estimator is biased under correlated heterogeneity and can lead to misleading inference. The mean group estimator proposed by \cite{PesaranSmith1995} is robust to correlated heterogeneity but requires the individual estimators to have second-order moments that could fail if the number of estimated coefficients ($k$) is close to the time dimension ($T$) of the panel. This paper focuses on panels where $T-k$ is mall (including $T=k$),…

Instrumental variable (IV) methods mitigate bias from unobserved confounding in observational causal inference but rely on the availability of a valid instrument, which can often be difficult or infeasible to identify in practice. In this paper, we propose a representation learning approach that constructs instrumental representations from observed covariates, which could enable IV-based estimation even in the absence of an explicit instrument. Our model (ZNet) achieves this…

Under i.i.d. sampling, the maximum score estimator of Manski (1975) converges at the cube-root rate to a non-Gaussian limit. We show that, under multiway dependence and low-level conditions, it is asymptotically normal at a parametric rate in the smallest number of clusters and, when the cluster-level variance is non-degenerate, as fast as regular estimators such as probit. The result rests on a general theory for non-smooth M-estimators, under which a modified bootstrap is…

We develop inference for complete dyadic samples with spatial dependence governed by geographic distances between nodes, covering settings beyond the scope of existing dyadic inference theory. We propose spatial variance and corrected block jackknife estimators consistent in nondegenerate and degenerate Gaussian cases. Under degeneracy, spatial subsampling consistently estimates possibly non-Gaussian limits. Combining the jackknife with subsampling yields the max…

Governments and development partners often seek Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) "accelerators" whose progress can propagate gains across human well-being, institutions, resources, and environmental priorities. Such claims require evidence on direction, timing, robustness, and trade-offs, not only network connectivity. We map directed SDG interdependence using a balanced panel of 114 countries observed annually from 2000 to 2024. Because the goal series are persistent,…

Predict-then-optimize methods learn a mapping from features to unknown edge costs. They then solve the shortest-path problem on the predicted costs. We study a feature-free alternative for the case where the decision-maker observes many noisy cost vectors on a fixed network. The cost vectors are denoised by an eigenvalue decomposition (PCA) of their covariance matrix. Dijkstra's algorithm then runs on the result. We test this on the $5\times5$ grid of \citet{elmachtoub2022},…