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混杂变量与中介角色不明时的模型稳健直接效应AI 解读

Direct effect analyses usually require deciding whether a focal variable is a pre-exposure confounder or a post-exposure mediator. In observational studies, that distinction may be unclear because timing is measured coarsely or the variable reflects an evolving process. Considering the average treatment effect (ATE) and the natural direct effect (NDE) as a common notion of the direct effect when the focal variable is a confounder and a mediator, respectively, we show that,…

社会科学实验样本流失的共形推断AI 解读

Attrition in survey and field experiments presents a challenge for social science research. Common approaches to deal with this problem -- such as complete case analysis, multiple imputation, and weighting methods -- rely on strong assumptions that may not hold in practice. This paper introduces a new method that combines recent advances in statistical inference with established tools for handling missing data. The approach produces prediction intervals for treatment effects…

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):…

面向政策选择的大规模析因实验设计AI 解读

Digital firms routinely run many online experiments on shared user populations. When product decisions are compositional, such as combinations of interface elements, flows, messages, or incentives, the number of feasible interventions grows combinatorially, while available traffic remains limited. Overlapping experiments can therefore generate interaction effects that are poorly handled by decentralized A/B testing. We study how to design large-scale factorial experiments…

动态离散选择模型中嵌入神经网络的训练AI 解读

We develop the first general-purpose estimator for infinite-horizon dynamic discrete choice models whose estimation problem, after pre-computation, is unencumbered by large systems of linear equations -- either imposed as constraints, or embedded in the objective function. Our unnested fixed point (UFXP) and optimal unnested fixed point (OUFXP) estimators exploit a dual representation of Bellman's equation to separate the utility parameters from the dynamic programming fixed…

从个体差异出发设定效应大小假说AI 解读

When designing and evaluating an experiment or observational study, it is useful to have a realistic hypothesis regarding the average treatment effect. We present an approach to conceptualizing this average by first considering a distribution of effects. We demonstrate with examples in medicine, economics, and psychology.

非高斯误差线性模型的半参数因果中介分析：药物治疗与社会项目评估AI 解读

\textbf{Background:} Mediation analysis is widely used to investigate how treatments and programs exert their effects, but standard ordinary least squares (OLS) inference can be unreliable when regression errors are non-Gaussian. In medical and public-health studies, this can affect whether indirect and direct effects are judged clinically or scientifically meaningful. \textbf{Methods:} We developed a semiparametric causal mediation framework for linear models allowing…

低阶结局交互干扰下的协变量调整与处理效应估计AI 解读

In randomized experiments, covariates are often used to reduce variance and improve the precision of treatment effect estimates. However, in many real-world settings, interference between units, where one unit's treatment affects another's outcome, complicates causal inference. This raises a key question: how can covariates be effectively used in the presence of interference? Addressing this challenge is nontrivial, as direct covariate adjustment, such as through regression,…

纵向整群随机与准实验试验中用于因果推断的固定效应模型AI 解读

This article investigates the model-robustness of fixed-effects models for analyzing a broad class of longitudinal cluster trials (CTs) such as stepped-wedge, parallel-with-baseline and crossover designs, encompassing both randomized (CRTs) and quasi-experimental (CQTs) designs. We clarify a longstanding misconception in biostatistics, demonstrating that fixed-effects models, traditionally perceived as targeting only finite-sample conditional estimands, can effectively…

无需第一阶段单调性的工具变量排除与外生性敏感性分析AI 解读

Exclusion and exogeneity are core assumptions in instrumental variable (IV) analyses, but their empirical validity is often debated. This paper develops new sensitivity analyses for these assumptions. Our results accommodate arbitrary heterogeneity in treatment effects and do not impose any monotonicity requirements on the first stage. Specifically, we derive identified sets for the marginal distributions of potential outcomes and their functionals, like average treatment…

基于加权分位数回归的稳健孟德尔随机化估计AI 解读

In Mendelian randomization (MR) studies, genetic variants are used as instrumental variables (IVs) to investigate causal relationships between exposures and outcomes based on observational data. However, numerous genetic studies have shown the pervasive pleiotropy of genetic variants, meaning that many, if not most, variants are associated with multiple traits, potentially violating the core assumptions of IV estimation. Uncorrelated pleiotropy occurs when genetic variants…

含固定效应的动态双边网络形成模型识别AI 解读

This paper establishes (set) identification results in a dynamic dyadic network formation model with time-varying observed covariates, lagged local network statistics, and unobserved heterogeneity in the form of fixed effects. Our framework accommodates observed-covariate homophily, transitivity through common friends, second-order or indirect-friend effects, and more general local subgraph statistics within a single dynamic index model. The analysis combines two…

当“无损一般性的规范化”损失一般性AI 解读

Normalization is ubiquitous in economics, and a growing literature shows that ``normalizations'' can matter for interpretation, counterfactual analysis, misspecification, and inference. This paper provides a general framework for these issues, based on the formalized notion of modeling equivalence that partitions the space of unknowns into equivalence classes, and defines normalization as a WLOG selection of one representative from each class. A counterfactual parameter is…

因果基础模型的干预时间序列先验AI 解读

Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) have emerged as powerful foundation models for tabular causal inference, yet their extension to time series remains limited by the absence of synthetic data generators that provide interventional targets. Existing time series benchmarks generate observational data with ground-truth causal graphs but lack the interventional data required for training causal foundation models. To address this, we propose \textbf{CausalTimePrior}, a principled…

非参数倾向得分估计的局部平衡校准AI 解读

The propensity score is widely used for causal inference in observational studies, but common parametric estimators can produce biased and inefficient effect estimates when model assumptions are violated. Nonparametric approaches reduce sensitivity to misspecification but often yield unstable weights and inadequate covariate balance. We propose Local Balance with Calibration, implemented by Neural Networks, a weighting method that combines flexible function approximation…

平均处理效应的高效协作学习AI 解读

In response to the growing need for generating real-world evidence from multi-site collaborative studies, we introduce an efficient collaborative learning approach to evaluate average treatment effect (ECO-ATE) in a multi-site setting under data sharing constraints. Specifically, ECO-ATE operates in a federated manner, using individual-level data from a user-defined target population and summary statistics from other source populations, to construct efficient estimator for…

用加权控制效应处理中介分析的正值性违背：既往抗原暴露人群的免疫保护关联应用AI 解读

Causal mediation analysis has become an important and increasingly used framework for evaluating candidate immune response biomarkers in vaccine research. A controlled effects approach has been proposed to estimate controlled risk curves under a counterfactual scenario in which the entire study population is vaccinated and their post-vaccination immune responses are set to a range of fixed levels. This framework performs well when the study population is antigenically naïve,…

营销增益建模中元学习器与因果森林的异质性处理效应大规模比较AI 解读

Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) at the individual level is central to precision marketing, yet systematic benchmarking of uplift modeling methods at industrial scale remains limited. We present UpliftBench, an empirical evaluation of four CATE estimators: S-Learner, T-Learner, X-Learner (all with LightGBM base learners), and Causal Forest (EconML), applied to the Criteo Uplift v2.1 dataset comprising 13.98 million customer records. The near-random…

不依赖生产率动态设定的生产函数非参数识别与估计AI 解读

Production function estimates underpin the measurement of firm-level markups, allocative efficiency, and the productivity effects of policy interventions. Since Olley and Pakes (1996), every major proxy variable estimator has identified the production function through a first-order Markov assumption on unobserved productivity; I show that misspecification of this assumption generates persistent upward bias in the materials elasticity that propagates into overestimated…

用分组固定效应估计轮换面板中的长期福利结果：秘鲁贫困动态应用AI 解读

Household welfare dynamics are often difficult to investigate due to lack of long-term panel data. Existing methods, such as pseudo-panel and synthetic panel, offer widely used solutions based on repeated cross-section designs, but they do not exploit within-household variation in rotating panel designs, which provide very useful information for estimating long-run dynamics. This paper applies grouped fixed effects (GFE) to estimate poverty mobility and persistence in a…

充分原因框架下的死亡截断AI 解读

The sufficient cause framework has been used for decades to improve our understanding of both basic and more complex causal concepts in epidemiology, such as mediation and interaction. Here, we make use of this framework to provide a description of truncation by death, in which the outcome of interest is undefined for individuals who die before the time of assessment at the end of follow-up. We explain the non-causal nature of the crude estimand that compares outcomes by…

结合目标学习推断的在线元层级自适应设计：代理结局的评价与利用AI 解读

Adaptive designs are increasingly used in clinical trials and online experiments to improve participant outcomes by dynamically updating treatment allocation as data accumulate. In practice, experimenters often consider multiple candidate designs, each with distinct trade-offs. However, typically only one design is implemented at a time, leaving benefits and costs of alternative designs unobserved and unquantified. To address this, we propose a novel meta-level adaptive…

涉及半连续暴露的因果推断：两阶段估计AI 解读

Methods for causal inference are well developed for binary and continuous exposures, but in many settings, the exposure has a substantial mass at zero-such exposures are called semi-continuous. We propose a general causal framework for such semi-continuous exposures, together with a novel two-stage estimation strategy. A two-part propensity structure is introduced for the semi-continuous exposure, with one component for exposure status (exposed vs unexposed) and another for…

不让任何人受损：具有遗憾厌恶的政策定向AI 解读

While the importance of personalized policymaking is widely recognized, fully personalized implementation remains rare in practice, often due to legal, fairness or cost concerns. We study the problem of policy targeting for a regret-averse planner when training data gives a rich set of observables while the assignment rules can only depend on its subset. Our regret-averse criterion reflects a planner's concern about regret inequality across the population. This, in general,…