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推荐系统中潜在混杂因素的因果结构表示学习AI 解读

Inferring user preferences from the historical feedback of users is a valuable problem in recommender systems. Conventional approaches often rely on the assumption that user preferences in the feedback data are equivalent to the real user preferences without additional noise, which simplifies the problem modeling. However, there are various confounders during user-item interactions, such as weather and even the recommendation system itself. Therefore, neglecting the…

同时存在死亡截断与缺失的多元结局整群随机试验贝叶斯推断AI 解读

Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) on fragile populations frequently encounter complex attrition problems where the reasons for missing outcomes can be heterogeneous, with participants who are known alive, known to have died, or with unknown survival status, and with complex and distinct missing data mechanisms for each group. Although existing methods have been developed to address death truncation in CRTs, no existing methods can jointly accommodate participants who drop out…

动态局部平均治疗效应AI 解读

We consider Dynamic Treatment Regimes (DTRs) with One Sided Noncompliance that arise in applications such as digital recommendations and adaptive medical trials. These are settings where decision makers encourage individuals to take treatments over time, but adapt encouragements based on previous encouragements, treatments, states, and outcomes. Importantly, individuals may not comply with encouragements based on unobserved confounders. For settings with binary treatments…

通过深度神经网络开展个体治疗效应的扩展信赖推断AI 解读

Individual treatment effect estimation has gained significant attention in recent data science literature. This work introduces the Double Neural Network (Double-NN) method to address this problem within the framework of extended fiducial inference (EFI). In the proposed method, deep neural networks are used to model the treatment and control effect functions, while an additional neural network is employed to estimate their parameters. The universal approximation capability…

高维时间序列网络中的 Granger 因果关系AI 解读

A novel approach is developed for discovering directed connectivity between specified pairs of nodes in a high-dimensional network (HDN) of brain signals. To accurately identify causal connectivity for such specified objectives, it is necessary to properly address the influence of all other nodes within the network. The proposed procedure herein starts with the estimation of a low-dimensional representation of the other nodes in the network utilizing (frequency-domain-based)…

如何抽样与何时停止：广义 Wald 问题及极小极大策略AI 解读

We study sequential experiments where sampling is costly and a decision-maker aims to determine the best treatment for full scale implementation by (1) adaptively allocating units between two possible treatments, and (2) stopping the experiment when the expected welfare (inclusive of sampling costs) from implementing the chosen treatment is maximized. Working under a continuous time limit, we characterize the optimal policies under the minimax regret criterion. We show that…

动态模型中的传导渠道分析AI 解读

We propose a framework for analysing transmission channels in a large class of dynamic models. We formulate our approach both using graph theory and potential outcomes, which we show to be equivalent. Our method, labelled Transmission Channel Analysis (TCA), allows for the decomposition of total effects captured by impulse response functions into the effects flowing through transmission channels, thereby providing a quantitative assessment of the strength of various…

通过 CATE 建模与 Shapley 值识别预测性生物标志物：概述与实践建议AI 解读

In recent years, two parallel research trends have emerged in machine learning, yet their intersections remain largely unexplored. On one hand, there has been a significant increase in literature focused on Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) modeling, particularly targeting the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) using meta-learner techniques. These approaches often aim to identify causal effects from observational data. On the other hand, the field of Explainable…

理解并避免 OLS 的“加权问题”：未建模的异质性与直接解决方案AI 解读

Researchers frequently estimate treatment effects by regressing outcomes (Y) on treatment (D) and covariates (X). Even without unobserved confounding, the coefficient on D yields a conditional-variance-weighted average of strata-wise effects, not the average treatment effect. Scholars have proposed characterizing the severity of these weights, evaluating resulting biases, or changing investigators' target estimand to the conditional-variance-weighted effect. We aim to…

信息性规模下的整群随机交叉试验究竟估计什么：目标量与常用估计量综述AI 解读

In the analysis of cluster randomized trials (CRTs), previous work has defined two meaningful estimands: the individual-average treatment effect (iATE) and cluster-average treatment effect (cATE) estimand, to address individual and cluster-level hypotheses. In multi-period CRT designs, such as the cluster randomized crossover (CRXO) trial, additional weighted average treatment effect estimands help fully reflect the longitudinal nature of these trial designs, namely the…

聚类序贯多次随机试验的 Q 学习：自适应干预中的效应调节变量AI 解读

A clustered adaptive intervention (cAI) is a pre-specified sequence of decision rules that guides practitioners on how best - and based on which measures - to tailor cluster-level intervention to improve outcomes at the level of individuals within the clusters. A clustered sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (cSMART) is a type of trial that is used to inform the empirical development of a cAI. The most common type of secondary aim in a cSMART focuses on assessing…

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…

带噪声最大线性贝叶斯网络的推断AI 解读

Max-Linear Bayesian Networks (MLBNs) provide a powerful framework for causal inference in extreme-value settings; we consider MLBNs with noise parameters with a given topology in terms of the max-plus algebra by taking its logarithm. Then, we show that an estimator of a parameter for each edge in a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is distributed normally. We end this paper with computational experiments with the expectation and maximization (EM) algorithm and quadratic…

协变量自适应随机化与不完全依从下处理效应的识别和推断AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) frequently utilize covariate-adaptive randomization (CAR) (e.g., stratified block randomization) and commonly suffer from imperfect compliance. This paper studies the identification and inference for the average treatment effect (ATE) and the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) in such RCTs with a binary treatment. We first develop characterizations of the identified sets for both estimands. Since data are generally not i.i.d.…

正交因果校准AI 解读

Estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects such as conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) and conditional quantile treatment effects (CQTEs) play an important role in real-world decision making. Given this importance, one should ensure these estimates are calibrated. While there is a rich literature on calibrating estimators of non-causal parameters, very few methods have been derived for calibrating estimators of causal parameters, or more generally estimators of…

存在混杂时的非线性因果发现AI 解读

This article introduces a causal discovery method to learn nonlinear relationships in a directed acyclic graph with correlated Gaussian errors due to confounding. First, we derive model identifiability under the sublinear growth assumption. Then, we propose a novel method, named the Deconfounded Functional Structure Estimation (DeFuSE), consisting of a deconfounding adjustment to remove the confounding effects and a sequential procedure to estimate the causal order of…

最近邻匹配的收敛率：支持域几何与高阶正则性AI 解读

Estimating some mathematical expectations from partially observed data and in particular missing outcomes is a central problem encountered in numerous fields such as transfer learning, counterfactual analysis or causal inference. Matching estimators, estimators based on k-nearest neighbours, are widely used in this context. It is known that the variance of such estimators can converge to zero at a parametric rate, but their bias can have a slower rate when the dimension of…

利用随时有效秩检验开展实时项目评估AI 解读

Counterfactual mean estimators such as difference-in-differences and synthetic control have grown into workhorse tools for program evaluation. Inference for these estimators is well-developed in settings where all post-treatment data is available at the time of analysis. However, in settings where data arrives sequentially, these tests do not permit real-time inference, as they require a pre-specified sample size T. We introduce real-time inference for program evaluation…

双射因果模型中的多域因果发现AI 解读

We consider the problem of causal discovery (a.k.a., causal structure learning) in a multi-domain setting. We assume that the causal functions are invariant across the domains, while the distribution of the exogenous noise may vary. Under causal sufficiency (i.e., no confounders exist), we show that the causal diagram can be discovered under less restrictive functional assumptions compared to previous work. What enables causal discovery in this setting is bijective…

评估真实世界证据模拟研究对随机试验的可重复性AI 解读

Background: The standard regulatory approach to assess replication success is the two-trials rule, requiring both the original and the replication study to be significant with effect estimates in the same direction. The sceptical p-value was recently presented as an alternative method for the statistical assessment of the replicability of study results. Methods: We review the statistical properties of the sceptical p-value and compare those to the two-trials rule. We extend…

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…

保持可忽略性并实现协变量匹配的处理效应表示学习AI 解读

Estimating treatment effects from observational data is challenging due to two main reasons: (a) hidden confounding, and (b) covariate mismatch (control and treatment groups not having identical distributions). Long lines of works exist that address only either of these issues. To address the former, conventional techniques that require detailed knowledge in the form of causal graphs have been proposed. For the latter, covariate matching and importance weighting methods have…

数据分布变化流中的持续因果效应估计AI 解读

Causal effect estimation has been widely used in marketing optimization. The framework of an uplift model followed by a constrained optimization algorithm is popular in practice. To enhance performance in the online environment, the framework needs to be improved to address the complexities caused by temporal dataset shift. This paper focuses on capturing the dataset shift from user behavior and domain distribution changing over time. We propose an Incremental Causal Effect…

死亡截断下利用纳入生存信息的分位数估计观测数据处理效应AI 解读

The issue of "truncation by death" commonly arises in clinical research: subjects may die before their follow-up assessment, resulting in undefined clinical outcomes. To address this issue, we focus on survival-incorporated quantiles -- quantiles of a composite outcome combining death and clinical outcomes -- to summarize the effect of treatment. Using inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW), we propose an estimator for survival-incorporated quantiles from…