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因果测地学：沿相关与因果之间的路径估计反事实AI 解读

We introduce causal geodesy, a framework for studying the landscape of stochastic interventions that lie between the two extremes of performing no intervention and performing a sharp intervention that sets an exposure equal to a specific value. We define this framework by constructing paths of distributions that smoothly interpolate between the treatment density and a point mass at the target intervention. Thus, each path starts at a purely observational (or correlational)…

解耦特征重要性AI 解读

When predictors are statistically dependent, the appropriate definition of feature importance depends on the operational goal. Conditional-incremental measures are well-suited for feature selection, acquisition, and compression, where shared predictive information is treated as redundancy. For post-hoc interpretation, however, the goal is often to attribute predictive signals across correlated measurement channels. We introduce Disentangled Feature Importance (DFI), a…

分布断点设计AI 解读

Regression discontinuity and kink designs are typically analyzed through mean effects, even when treatment changes the shape of the entire outcome distribution. To address this, we introduce distributional discontinuity designs, a framework for estimating causal effects for a scalar outcome at the boundary of a discontinuity in treatment assignment. Our estimand is the Wasserstein distance between limiting conditional outcome distributions; a single scale-interpretable…

利用扩展传染病模型进行因果推断AI 解读

Epidemic models describe the evolution of a communicable disease over time. These models are often modified to include the effects of interventions (control measures) such as vaccination, social distancing, school closings etc. Many such models were proposed during the COVID-19 epidemic. Inevitably these models are used to answer the question: What is the effect of the intervention on the epidemic? These models can either be interpreted as data generating models describing…

利用代理 p 值与 e 值的主动多重检验AI 解读

Researchers often lack the resources to test every hypothesis of interest directly or compute test statistics comprehensively, but often possess auxiliary data from which we can compute an estimate of the experimental outcome. We introduce a novel approach for selecting which hypotheses to query a statistic (e.g., run an experiment, perform expensive computation, etc.) in a hypothesis testing setup by leveraging estimates to compute proxy statistics. Our framework allows a…

利用替代控制结果进行弱假设数据整合后推断AI 解读

Data integration methods aim to extract low-dimensional embeddings from high-dimensional outcomes to remove unwanted variations, such as batch effects and unmeasured covariates, across heterogeneous datasets. However, multiple hypothesis testing after integration can be biased due to data-dependent processes. We introduce a robust post-integrated inference method that accounts for latent heterogeneity by utilizing control outcomes. Leveraging causal interpretations, we…

模型误设下的稳健通用推断AI 解读

In statistical inference, it is rarely realistic that the hypothesized statistical model is well-specified, and consequently it is important to understand the effects of misspecification on inferential procedures. When the hypothesized statistical model is misspecified, the natural target of inference is a projection of the data generating distribution onto the model. We present a general method for constructing valid confidence sets for such projections, under weak…

不依赖结构的泛函估计之基本极限AI 解读

Many recent developments in causal inference, and functional estimation problems more generally, have been motivated by the fact that classical one-step (first-order) debiasing methods, or their more recent sample-split double machine-learning avatars, can outperform plugin estimators under surprisingly weak conditions. These first-order corrections improve on plugin estimators in a black-box fashion, and consequently are often used in conjunction with powerful off-the-shelf…

双重交叉拟合的双重稳健估计：超越级数回归AI 解读

Doubly robust estimators with cross-fitting have gained popularity in causal inference due to their favorable structure-agnostic error guarantees. However, when additional structure, such as Hölder smoothness, is available then more accurate "double cross-fit doubly robust" (DCDR) estimators can be constructed by splitting the training data and undersmoothing nuisance function estimators on independent samples. We study a DCDR estimator of the Expected Conditional…

具有多个异质结局的基因组数据因果推断AI 解读

With the evolution of single-cell RNA sequencing techniques into a standard approach in genomics, it has become possible to conduct cohort-level causal inferences based on single-cell-level measurements. However, the individual gene expression levels of interest are not directly observable; instead, only repeated proxy measurements from each individual's cells are available, providing a derived outcome to estimate the underlying outcome for each of many genes. In this paper,…

随机干预、敏感性分析与最优传输AI 解读

Recent methodological research in causal inference has focused on effects of stochastic interventions, which assign treatment randomly, often according to subject-specific covariates. In this work, we demonstrate that the usual notion of stochastic interventions have a surprising property: when there is unmeasured confounding, bounds on their effects do not collapse when the policy approaches the observational regime. As an alternative, we propose to study generalized…

连续处理下倾向得分修剪后的因果效应估计AI 解读

Propensity score trimming, which discards subjects with propensity scores below a threshold, is a common way to address positivity violations that complicate causal effect estimation. However, most works on trimming assume treatment is discrete and models for the outcome regression and propensity score are parametric. This work proposes nonparametric estimators for trimmed average causal effects in the case of continuous treatments based on efficient influence functions. For…

在控制错误发现率的同时交互式识别具有正向处理效应的个体AI 解读

Out of the participants in a randomized experiment with anticipated heterogeneous treatment effects, is it possible to identify which subjects have a positive treatment effect? While subgroup analysis has received attention, claims about individual participants are much more challenging. We frame the problem in terms of multiple hypothesis testing: each individual has a null hypothesis (stating that the potential outcomes are equal, for example) and we aim to identify those…

残差非线性回归：时变处理与协变量下的因果估计AI 解读

Standard regression adjustment gives inconsistent estimates of causal effects when there are time-varying treatment effects and time-varying covariates. Loosely speaking, the issue is that some covariates are post-treatment variables because they may be affected by prior treatment status, and regressing out post-treatment variables causes bias. More precisely, the bias is due to certain non-confounding latent variables that create colliders in the causal graph. These latent…

异质性因果效应估计的极小极大收敛速率AI 解读

Estimation of heterogeneous causal effects - i.e., how effects of policies and treatments vary across subjects - is a fundamental task in causal inference. Many methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) have been proposed in recent years, but questions surrounding optimality have remained largely unanswered. In particular, a minimax theory of optimality has yet to be developed, with the minimax rate of convergence and construction of rate-optimal…

反事实的保守推断AI 解读

In causal inference, the joint law of a set of counterfactual random variables is generally not identified. We show that a conservative version of the joint law - corresponding to the smallest treatment effect - is identified. Finding this law uses recent results from optimal transport theory. Under this conservative law we can bound causal effects and we may construct inferences for each individual's counterfactual dose-response curve. Intuitively, this is the flattest…

边际结构模型的敏感性分析AI 解读

We introduce several methods for assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding in marginal structural models; importantly we allow treatments to be discrete or continuous, static or time-varying. We consider three sensitivity models: a propensity-based model, an outcome-based model, and a subset confounding model, in which only a fraction of the population is subject to unmeasured confounding. In each case we develop efficient estimators and confidence intervals for bounds…

COVID-19 疫情时期的因果推断AI 解读

In this paper we develop statistical methods for causal inference in epidemics. Our focus is in estimating the effect of social mobility on deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic. We propose a marginal structural model motivated by a modified version of a basic epidemic model. We estimate the counterfactual time series of deaths under interventions on mobility. We conduct several types of sensitivity analyses. We find that the data support the idea that reduced mobility causes…

半参数反事实密度估计AI 解读

Causal effects are often characterized with averages, which can give an incomplete picture of the underlying counterfactual distributions. Here we consider estimating the entire counterfactual density and generic functionals thereof. We focus on two kinds of target parameters. The first is a density approximation, defined by a projection onto a finite-dimensional model using a generalized distance metric, which includes f-divergences as well as $L_p$ norms. The second is the…