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层级因果模型AI 解读

Causal questions often arise in settings where data are hierarchical: subunits are nested within units. Consider students in schools, cells in patients, or cities in states. In these settings, unit-level variables (e.g., a school's budget) may affect subunit-level outcomes (e.g., student test scores), and subunit-level characteristics may aggregate to influence unit-level outcomes. In this paper, we show how to analyze hierarchical data for causal inference. We introduce…

从观察性数据学习的幻觉：经验贝叶斯视角AI 解读

Randomized experiments have long been the gold standard for scientists seeking to learn about cause and effect. When randomized experiments are infeasible, scientists often resort to observational studies, which are widely available and often large but rely on untestable assumptions that, when violated, may result in biased estimates. Uncertainty about bias leads to a phenomenon known as the illusion of learning from observational research (Gerber, Green and Kaplan, 2004a):…

通过广义贝叶斯对参数模型进行自适应非参数扰动AI 解读

Parametric Bayesian modeling offers a powerful and flexible toolbox for machine learning. Yet the model, however detailed, may still be wrong, and this can make inferences untrustworthy. In this paper we introduce a new class of semiparametric corrections for parametric Bayesian models, when the target of inference is a functional of the true data distribution. Our starting point is a fully Bayesian modeling approach, which explicitly accounts for the possibility that the…

线性混合因果表征的多域经验贝叶斯学习AI 解读

Causal representation learning (CRL) aims to learn low-dimensional causal latent variables from high-dimensional observations. While identifiability has been extensively studied for CRL, estimation has been less explored. In this paper, we explore the use of empirical Bayes (EB) to estimate causal representations. In particular, we consider the problem of learning from data from multiple domains, where differences between domains are modeled by interventions in a shared…

利用基础模型估计工资差异AI 解读

The rise of foundation models marks a paradigm shift in machine learning: instead of training specialized models from scratch, foundation models are first trained on massive datasets before being adapted or fine-tuned to make predictions on smaller datasets. Initially developed for text, foundation models have also excelled at making predictions about social science data. However, while many estimation problems in the social sciences use prediction as an intermediate step,…

基于异质环境优化的因果估计AI 解读

This paper presents a new optimization approach to causal estimation. Given data that contains covariates and an outcome, which covariates are causes of the outcome, and what is the strength of the causality? In classical machine learning (ML), the goal of optimization is to maximize predictive accuracy. However, some covariates might exhibit a non-causal association with the outcome. Such spurious associations provide predictive power for classical ML, but they prevent us…

CAREER：劳动就业序列数据的基础模型AI 解读

Labor economists regularly analyze employment data by fitting predictive models to small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets. Although machine learning methods offer promise for such problems, these survey datasets are too small to take advantage of them. In recent years large datasets of online resumes have also become available, providing data about the career trajectories of millions of individuals. However, standard econometric models cannot take…

合成控制中线性假设的误设AI 解读

The synthetic control (SC) method is a popular approach for estimating treatment effects from observational panel data. It rests on a crucial assumption that we can write the treated unit as a linear combination of the untreated units. This linearity assumption, however, can be unlikely to hold in practice and, when violated, the resulting SC estimates are incorrect. In this paper we examine two questions: (1) How large can the misspecification error be? (2) How can we limit…

个体处理效应的共形敏感性分析AI 解读

Estimating an individual treatment effect (ITE) is essential to personalized decision making. However, existing methods for estimating the ITE often rely on unconfoundedness, an assumption that is fundamentally untestable with observed data. To assess the robustness of individual-level causal conclusion with unconfoundedness, this paper proposes a method for sensitivity analysis of the ITE, a way to estimate a range of the ITE under unobserved confounding. The method we…

后验预测零假设检验AI 解读

Bayesian model criticism is an important part of the practice of Bayesian statistics. Traditionally, model criticism methods have been based on the predictive check, an adaptation of goodness-of-fit testing to Bayesian modeling and an effective method to understand how well a model captures the distribution of the data. In modern practice, however, researchers iteratively build and develop many models, exploring a space of models to help solve the problem at hand. While…

合成控制方法的假设AI 解读

Synthetic control (SC) methods have been widely applied to estimate the causal effect of large-scale interventions, e.g., the state-wide effect of a change in policy. The idea of synthetic controls is to approximate one unit's counterfactual outcomes using a weighted combination of some other units' observed outcomes. The motivating question of this paper is: how does the SC strategy lead to valid causal inferences? We address this question by re-formulating the causal…

SHOPPER：含替代与互补关系的消费者选择概率模型AI 解读

We develop SHOPPER, a sequential probabilistic model of shopping data. SHOPPER uses interpretable components to model the forces that drive how a customer chooses products; in particular, we designed SHOPPER to capture how items interact with other items. We develop an efficient posterior inference algorithm to estimate these forces from large-scale data, and we analyze a large dataset from a major chain grocery store. We are interested in answering counterfactual queries…

贝叶斯因果推断的模型诊断AI 解读

The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and testing those assumptions is important to assess the validity of causal inference. We develop model criticism for Bayesian causal inference, building on the idea of posterior predictive checks to assess model fit. Our approach involves…