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嵌套工具变量分析：转换者平均处理效应及可推广性AI 解读

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects from non-randomized data. A canonical example is a randomized trial with noncompliance, in which the randomized treatment assignment serves as an IV for the non-ignorable treatment received. Under a monotonicity assumption, a valid IV nonparametrically identifies the average treatment effect among a latent complier subgroup, whose generalizability is often under debate. In many studies, there exist…

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…

前门模型下因果效应的灵活非参数推断AI 解读

Evaluating causal treatment effects in observational studies requires addressing confounding. While the back-door criterion enables identification through adjustment for observed covariates, it fails in the presence of unmeasured confounding. The front-door criterion offers an alternative by leveraging variables that fully mediate the treatment effect and are unaffected by unmeasured confounders of the treatment-outcome pair. We develop novel one-step and targeted minimum…

使用 AI 学习表征的实用双重机器学习AI 解读

Text, images, and other rich covariates are increasingly compressed into AI-learned representations and then used as controls in causal analysis. We study when this approach is valid and develop a practical framework for causal inference with learned representations. For a broad class of estimands, an imperfect representation distorts the target causal parameter by the product of two representation errors: one in the outcome regression and one in the balancing weight (or…

The bootstrap is widely used to construct confidence intervals but may perform poorly for some estimators. We consider semiparametric estimators that use cross-validation to estimate nuisance pa- rameters and can be computationally expensive in large datasets. We illustrate potential problems with bootstrapping with replacement when cross-validation is used and extend the cheap bootstrap confidence interval to subsampling without replacement for asymptotically linear…

插补就够了：平均处理效应估计的双稳健、半参数有效性与自动协变量平衡AI 解读

Imputation-based causal estimation is typically viewed as relying exclusively on an outcome model, in contrast to augmented inverse-probability weighting, whose consistency is protected by fitting two nuisance models. This paper argues that this view can be misleading by highlighting a hidden dual weighting structure in least-squares sieve regression imputation. Although only outcome regressions are explicitly fitted, the resulting imputation estimator admits an exact…

随时间刻画幸存者主层：识别、有效估计与敏感性分析AI 解读

Longitudinal studies with functional outcomes subject to truncation-by-death frequently report time-indexed survivor average causal effect estimates, defined among individuals who would survive regardless of treatment assignment. Because the survivor stratum can change over time, the resulting effect estimates may pertain to populations with different characteristics. We propose accompanying survivor average causal effect estimates with measures of covariate divergence…

双重差分与合成控制的结合：双重稳健识别和估计AI 解读

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Synthetic Control (SC) are widely used methods for causal inference in panel data, each with distinct strengths and limitations. We propose a novel method for short-panel causal inference that integrates the advantages of both approaches. Our method delivers a doubly robust identification strategy for the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) under either of two non-nested assumptions: parallel trends or a group-level SC condition.…

整群随机试验中依从效应与网络因果效应的识别和有效估计AI 解读

Treatment noncompliance is pervasive in infectious disease cluster-randomized trials. Although all individuals within a cluster are assigned the same treatment condition, the treatment uptake status may vary across individuals due to noncompliance. We propose a semiparametric framework to evaluate the individual compliance effect and network assignment effect within principal stratum exhibiting different patterns of noncompliance. The individual compliance effect captures…

切片 Lp 分布平衡方法AI 解读

A popular class of causal inference methods addresses confounding through weighting, which reweights treated and control groups to balance their covariate distributions without using outcome information, thereby preserving a design-based perspective. In this paper, we propose sliced $L^p$ distributional balancing (SLDB), a family indexed by $p\in[1,\infty)$ that measures imbalance by averaging squared $L^p$ distances between the cumulative distribution functions of…

协变量依赖删失下半竞争风险数据的双重稳健估计AI 解读

Semi-competing risks occur when individuals may experience a non-terminal event and a terminal event, where the terminal event censors the non-terminal event but not vice versa. In the presence of covariate-dependent censoring, augmented inverse probability of censoring weighting (AIPCW) framework has not been developed for the special setting of semi-competing risks which, unlike competing risks, have asymmetric event time structure and complex estimands. Using…

BLP 模型中的条件矩估计与推断AI 解读

The random-coefficient demand model of Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) is commonly estimated by the generalized method of moments (GMM), using an unconditional moment restriction with a fixed set of instruments. Identification of the model, however, rests on a conditional moment restriction. The two are not equivalent: the unconditional restriction may admit additional parameter values. We construct a counterexample in which the model is identified by the conditional…

观察性时间序列动态因果效应的半参数推断AI 解读

In observational time series, statistical inference for dynamic causal effects of a one-time intervention across horizons is complicated by high-dimensional observed pre-treatment information, unmeasured confounding, and serial dependence. To address these challenges, we develop a semiparametric framework for inference from a single serially dependent time series, integrating debiased machine learning with instrumental variables through buffered block cross-fitting. Under…

战略网络形成模型中的单网络有限样本推断AI 解读

We develop a finite-sample valid inference procedure for strategic network formation models with endogenous network statistics, using only a single observed network. We impose no restrictions on network density, equilibrium selection, or the dependence structure induced by strategic interaction. Using a "bounding-by-c" technique, we obtain realization-wise sandwich inequalities whose middle term depends only on exogenous covariates and i.i.d. pairwise shocks. These…

内生网络下的半参数动态 Logit 模型AI 解读

Many choices persist over time and are made among friends. Teenagers who smoke tend to keep smoking, and they tend to have friends who smoke. Part of this persistence is habit, but part may come from characteristics researchers do not observe, such as a taste for risk, that shape both whether a student smokes and whom they befriend. Methods that treat friendships as given cannot separate the two when the characteristic changes over time. This paper shows how the friendship…

两阶段抽样下加权处理效应的有效估计AI 解读

Two-phase sampling offers a practical way to collect costly confounders only in a subsample while retaining inexpensive information for a larger cohort. In observational causal studies, however, phase-2 selection can distort estimation of population causal effects if the sampling mechanism is ignored, and available phase-1 information may also be exploited to improve efficiency. Yet efficiency theory for causal estimands under such designs remains limited, particularly…

连接局部与总体因果效应：近端工具变量方法AI 解读

Instrumental variable (IV) methods address treatment endogeneity, but with non-compliance and heterogeneous treatment effects a binary instrument generally identifies the local average treatment effect (LATE) among compliers rather than the population average treatment effect (ATE). When treatment effects and compliance probabilities are heterogeneous and dependent through latent factors, the ATE need not be identified by IV variation alone. We develop a proximal…

超越线性：多值处理污染偏误的半参数解决方案AI 解读

We examine semiparametric solutions to contamination bias for nonbinary treatments. Deepening the discussion by Goldsmith-Pinkham et al. (2024), we detail how spline functions approximate conditional expectation and propensity score functions under weak functional-form assumptions. Reanalyzing 18 regressions across 11 studies, we compare standard linear regressions against parametric and semiparametric versions of three contamination-robust estimators. We document large…

审查员工具变量设计的局部稳健半参数方法AI 解读

I propose a locally robust semiparametric framework for estimating causal effects using examiner IV designs when adjustment for many or continuous covariates makes saturation infeasible or produces sparse cells. The key ingredient of this approach is an orthogonal moment function that removes the first-order effect of estimation errors in the two treatment regressions defining the examiner IV. I derive the orthogonal moment function and show that it remains valid under…

生存治疗效应的有效迁移与推广AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials provide internally valid estimates of treatment effects, but their results may not directly apply to broader target populations due to differences in baseline covariate distributions, adherence to treatment or variations in outcome mechanisms. Under standard transport and time-to-event identifiability assumptions, we develop nonparametric, debiased machine learning estimators for transporting and generalizing causal survival treatment effect…

单调序贯随机缺失下的有效估计与完整案例粗化成本AI 解读

Complete-case coarsening discards observed confounder values from partially complete records. We study its consequences for average treatment effect estimation with two ordered, partially observed confounders under monotone sequential missing at random. We specialize the standard coarsening-at-random transformation to the causal influence function, establish the canonical gradient, and give an exact drift identity for a cross-fitted estimator with sequential multiple…

生成式人工智能辅助的非结构化数据动态因果推断AI 解读

A growing number of scholars seek to estimate causal effects of unstructured data such as text, images, and video. However, existing methods typically treat each object as a single, static observation. We develop a statistical framework for dynamic causal inference with unstructured data by leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models. Our approach enables researchers to estimate the causal effects of sequences of treatment features, including their positions…

超越平均处理效应的最优协变量调整：已处理人群与重叠加权目标AI 解读

Graphical causal inference supplies a complete theory of efficient covariate adjustment for the average treatment effect: one adjustment set, computable from the graph, is optimal under every compatible distribution. We show that this is a property of the average treatment effect's inverse-prevalence weights, not of causal estimands in general. For the average treatment effect on the treated we index the efficiency bound by the adjustment set and derive exact identities for…

存在低报的有序选择模型中的变化中变化方法AI 解读

We develop a Difference-in-Differences framework for discrete, ordered outcomes subject to underreporting. Such outcomes commonly arise in self-reported surveys on socially undesirable or stigmatized behaviors, where respondents may conceal their true behavior. For a discrete Changes-in-Changes model that is shown to admit an equivalent threshold-crossing representation, we derive nonparametric bounds for the counterfactual and factual outcome distributions as well as for…