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We study nonparametric inference for a continuous-treatment causal dose-response curve and its first derivative under unmeasured confounding, using treatment- and outcome-inducing proxies. We establish a proximal doubly robust pseudo-outcome whose conditional mean given treatment equals the dose-response curve whenever either bridge function is correctly specified. Their (smoothed) efficient influence function representations lead to cross-fitted local-polynomial estimators…

部分识别处理效应的广义信仰推断框架AI 解读

Over the past two decades, there has been renewed interest in fiducial inference, a statistical framework originally proposed by R. A. Fisher in the 1930s. Existing contributions, however, have largely focused on point-identified models, where the parameter vector is uniquely determined by the joint distribution of the observables and the model assumptions. This paper develops a unified fiducial inference procedure for partially identified models, thereby extending the…

加性工具变量下连续处理效应的双重机器学习AI 解读

Estimating causal effects of continuous treatments is a common problem in practice, for example, in studying average dose-response functions. Classical analyses typically assume that all confounders are fully observed, whereas in real-world applications, unmeasured confounding often persists. In this article, we propose a novel framework for the identification of average dose-response functions using instrumental variables, thereby mitigating bias induced by unobserved…

存在隐藏反悔见证变量时的近端中介分析AI 解读

Mediation analysis is essential for decomposing the causal effect of a treatment into direct and indirect pathways. However, many practical settings rely on the stringent assumption that recanting witnesses, defined as treatment-induced mediator-outcome confounders, are either absent or fully known a priori. Such a requirement is often untenable, especially when these variables remain unobservable due to measurement difficulties or privacy constraints. In this paper, we…

人口干预中间接效应与干预变量效应的近端推断AI 解读

Unmeasured confounding, unethical exposure, and ill-defined interventions pose significant challenges to evaluating policy-relevant mediation estimands in medicine and public health. In observational studies involving harmful exposures, the population intervention indirect effect (PIIE) is often more salient than the natural indirect effect, as the latter relies on hypothetical interventions that may be ethically or practically unfeasible. While the PIIE can be identified…

近端路径特定效应推断AI 解读

Causal mediation analysis has been extended to estimate path-specific effects with multiple intermediate variables, isolating treatment effects through a mediator of interest while excluding pathways through its ancestors. Such analyses address bias from recanting witnesses, i.e., treatment-induced mediator-outcome confounders. However, existing methods typically rely on stringent assumptions precluding general unmeasured confounding, which are often violated in practice. In…

一般工具变量下因果效应的识别与去偏学习AI 解读

Instrumental variable methods are fundamental to causal inference when treatment assignment is confounded by unobserved variables. In this article, we develop a general nonparametric causal framework for identification and learning with multi-categorical or continuous instrumental variables. Specifically, the mean potential outcomes and the average treatment effect can be identified via a regular weighting function derived from the proposed framework. Leveraging…

近端动态治疗策略的多重稳健性AI 解读

Dynamic treatment regimes are sequential decision rules that adapt treatment according to individual time-varying characteristics and outcomes to achieve optimal effects, with applications in precision medicine, personalized recommendations, and dynamic marketing. Estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes via sequential randomized trials might face costly and ethical hurdles, often necessitating the use of historical observational data. In this work, we utilize proximal…

未测混杂下连续动作空间的强化学习AI 解读

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and assumes discrete action spaces, we advance this field by establishing a novel identification result to enable the nonparametric estimation of policy value for a given target policy under an…

面向分布福利的政策学习AI 解读

In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While average welfare is intuitive, it may yield undesirable allocations especially when individuals are heterogeneous (e.g., with outliers) - the very reason individualized treatments were introduced in the first place. This observation motivates us…

以 Copula 半竞争风险模型研究乳腺癌激素治疗与放疗的因果效应AI 解读

Breast cancer patients may experience relapse or death after surgery during the follow-up period, leading to dependent censoring of relapse. This phenomenon, known as semi-competing risk, imposes challenges in analyzing treatment effects on breast cancer and necessitates advanced statistical tools for unbiased analysis. Despite progress in estimation and inference within semi-competing risks regression, its application to causal inference is still in its early stages. This…

近端因果学习的最优处理规则AI 解读

A common concern when a policymaker draws causal inferences from and makes decisions based on observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding, i.e., the standard no confoundedness assumption fails to hold. The recently proposed proximal causal inference framework shows that proxy variables that abound in real-life scenarios can be leveraged to identify causal effects and therefore facilitate…

用于政策学习的半参数工具变量双重差分方法AI 解读

Recently, there has been a surge in methodological development for the difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to evaluate causal effects. Standard methods in the literature rely on the parallel trends assumption to identify the average treatment effect on the treated. However, the parallel trends assumption may be violated in the presence of unmeasured confounding, and the average treatment effect on the treated may not be useful in learning a treatment assignment policy…

条件平均处理效应的近端因果学习AI 解读

Efficiently and flexibly estimating treatment effect heterogeneity is an important task in a wide variety of settings ranging from medicine to marketing, and there are a considerable number of promising conditional average treatment effect estimators currently available. These, however, typically rely on the assumption that the measured covariates are enough to justify conditional exchangeability. We propose the P-learner, motivated by the R- and DR-learner, a tailored…

利用因果生存森林估计右删失数据中的异质性处理效应AI 解读

Forest-based methods have recently gained in popularity for non-parametric treatment effect estimation. Building on this line of work, we introduce causal survival forests, which can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in a survival and observational setting where outcomes may be right-censored. Our approach relies on orthogonal estimating equations to robustly adjust for both censoring and selection effects under unconfoundedness. In our experiments, we find…

边际反事实生存曲线的近端因果推断AI 解读

Contrasting marginal counterfactual survival curves across treatment arms is an effective and popular approach for inferring the causal effect of an intervention on a right-censored time-to-event outcome. A key challenge to drawing such inferences in observational settings is the possible existence of unmeasured confounding, which may invalidate most commonly used methods that assume no hidden confounding bias. In this paper, rather than making the standard no unmeasured…

部分识别下的个体化决策：三种视角、两个最优性结果与一个悖论AI 解读

Unmeasured confounding is a threat to causal inference and gives rise to biased estimates. In this article, we consider the problem of individualized decision-making under partial identification. Firstly, we argue that when faced with unmeasured confounding, one should pursue individualized decision-making using partial identification in a comprehensive manner. We establish a formal link between individualized decision-making under partial identification and classical…