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含隐藏变量因果图中最优调整集的充要图条件AI 解读

The problem of selecting optimal backdoor adjustment sets to estimate causal effects in graphical models with hidden and conditioned variables is addressed. Previous work has defined optimality as achieving the smallest asymptotic estimation variance and derived an optimal set for the case without hidden variables. For the case with hidden variables there can be settings where no optimal set exists and currently only a sufficient graphical optimality criterion of limited…

基于二维得分的异质性处理效应估计AI 解读

Statisticians show growing interest in estimating and analyzing heterogeneity in causal effects in observational studies. However, there usually exists a trade-off between accuracy and interpretability for developing a desirable estimator for treatment effects, especially in the case when there are a large number of features in estimation. To make efforts to address the issue, we propose a score-based framework for estimating the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE)…

歧视评估成绩单AI 解读

We develop an Empirical Bayes grading scheme that balances the informativeness of the assigned grades against the expected frequency of ranking errors. Applying the method to a massive correspondence experiment, we grade the racial biases of 97 U.S. employers. A four-grade ranking limits the chances that a randomly selected pair of firms is mis-ranked to 5% while explaining nearly half of the variation in firms' racial contact gaps. The grades are presented alongside…

潜在情境下基于多数据集的时间序列因果发现AI 解读

Causal discovery from time series data is a typical problem setting across the sciences. Often, multiple datasets of the same system variables are available, for instance, time series of river runoff from different catchments. The local catchment systems then share certain causal parents, such as time-dependent large-scale weather over all catchments, but differ in other catchment-specific drivers, such as the altitude of the catchment. These drivers can be called temporal…

电力需求价格弹性：用工具变量处理高频时间序列的内生性与自相关AI 解读

This paper examines empirical methods for estimating the response of aggregated electricity demand to high-frequency price signals, the short-term elasticity of electricity demand. We investigate how the endogeneity of prices and the autocorrelation of the time series, which are particularly pronounced at hourly granularity, affect and distort common estimators. After developing a controlled test environment with synthetic data that replicate key statistical properties of…

二的 K 次方析因设计中随机化推断的最优样本量分配AI 解读

Optimizing the allocation of units into treatment groups can help researchers improve the precision of causal estimators and decrease costs when running factorial experiments. However, existing optimal allocation results typically assume a super-population model and that the outcome data comes from a known family of distributions. Instead, we focus on randomization-based causal inference for the finite-population setting, which does not require model specifications for the…

学习条件工具变量表征以估计因果效应AI 解读

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias caused by unmeasured confounders that affect both the treatment and the outcome. The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a powerful way to eliminate the confounding bias from latent confounders. However, the existing IV-based estimators…

因果生存嵌入：删失下的非参数反事实推断AI 解读

Model-free time-to-event regression under confounding presents challenges due to biases introduced by causal and censoring sampling mechanisms. This phenomenology poses problems for classical non-parametric estimators like Beran's or the k-nearest neighbours algorithm. In this study, we propose a natural framework that leverages the structure of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) and, specifically, the concept of kernel mean embedding to address these limitations. Our…

用因果分析增强神经网络解释的稳健性AI 解读

Interpreting the inner function of neural networks is crucial for the trustworthy development and deployment of these black-box models. Prior interpretability methods focus on correlation-based measures to attribute model decisions to individual examples. However, these measures are susceptible to noise and spurious correlations encoded in the model during the training phase (e.g., biased inputs, model overfitting, or misspecification). Moreover, this process has proven to…

半参数后验校正AI 解读

We present a new approach to semiparametric inference using corrected posterior distributions. The method allows us to leverage the adaptivity, regularization and predictive power of nonparametric Bayesian procedures to estimate low-dimensional functionals of interest without being restricted by the holistic Bayesian formalism. Starting from a conventional nonparametric posterior, we target the functional of interest by transforming the entire distribution with a Bayesian…

RobustIV 与 controlfunctionIV：可能无效工具变量下的因果推断软件AI 解读

We present R software packages RobustIV and controlfunctionIV for causal inference with possibly invalid instrumental variables. RobustIV focuses on the linear outcome model. It implements the two-stage hard thresholding method to select valid instrumental variables from a set of candidate instrumental variables and make inferences for the causal effect in both low- and high-dimensional settings. Furthermore, RobustIV implements the high-dimensional endogeneity test and the…

异方差数据的条件独立检验及其因果发现应用AI 解读

Conditional independence (CI) testing is frequently used in data analysis and machine learning for various scientific fields and it forms the basis of constraint-based causal discovery. Oftentimes, CI testing relies on strong, rather unrealistic assumptions. One of these assumptions is homoskedasticity, in other words, a constant conditional variance is assumed. We frame heteroskedasticity in a structural causal model framework and present an adaptation of the partial…

用于干预后密度估计的归一化流AI 解读

Existing machine learning methods for causal inference usually estimate quantities expressed via the mean of potential outcomes (e.g., average treatment effect). However, such quantities do not capture the full information about the distribution of potential outcomes. In this work, we estimate the density of potential outcomes after interventions from observational data. For this, we propose a novel, fully-parametric deep learning method called Interventional Normalizing…

CF-GODE：多主体动态系统的连续时间因果推断AI 解读

Multi-agent dynamical systems refer to scenarios where multiple units interact with each other and evolve collectively over time. To make informed decisions in multi-agent dynamical systems, such as determining the optimal vaccine distribution plan, it is essential for decision-makers to estimate the continuous-time counterfactual outcomes. However, existing studies of causal inference over time rely on the assumption that units are mutually independent, which is not valid…

有限图结构知识下超越马尔可夫等价类的前门调整AI 解读

Causal effect estimation from data typically requires assumptions about the cause-effect relations either explicitly in the form of a causal graph structure within the Pearlian framework, or implicitly in terms of (conditional) independence statements between counterfactual variables within the potential outcomes framework. When the treatment variable and the outcome variable are confounded, front-door adjustment is an important special case where, given the graph, causal…

条件因果效应的可识别性AI 解读

We address the problem of identifiability of an arbitrary conditional causal effect given both the causal graph and a set of any observational and/or interventional distributions of the form $Q[S]:=P(S|do(V\setminus S))$, where $V$ denotes the set of all observed variables and $S\subseteq V$. We call this problem conditional generalized identifiability (c-gID in short) and prove the completeness of Pearl's $do$-calculus for the c-gID problem by providing sound and complete…

通过正式协变量基准比较界定遗漏变量偏差AI 解读

Covariate benchmarking is an important part of sensitivity analysis about omitted variable bias and can be used to bound the strength of the unobserved confounder using information and judgments about observed covariates. It is common to carry out formal covariate benchmarking after residualizing the unobserved confounder on the set of observed covariates. In this paper, I explain the rationale and details of this procedure. I clarify some important details of the process of…

预测模型能否用于因果推断？AI 解读

Supervised machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms excel at predictive tasks, but it is commonly assumed that they often do so by exploiting non-causal correlations, which may limit both interpretability and generalizability. Here, we show that this trade-off between explanation and prediction is not as deep and fundamental as expected. Whereas ML and DL algorithms will indeed tend to use non-causal features for prediction when fed indiscriminately with all…

二元回归中遗漏连续协变量：敏感性与中介分析AI 解读

By exploiting the theory of skew-symmetric distributions, we generalise existing results in sensitivity analysis by providing the analytic expression of the bias induced by marginalization over an unobserved continuous confounder in a logistic regression model. The expression is approximated and mimics Cochran's formula under some simplifying assumptions. Other link functions and error distributions are also considered. A simulation study is performed to assess its…

不完全依从的协变量自适应随机化中利用回归调整提高估计效率AI 解读

We investigate how to improve efficiency using regression adjustments with covariates in covariate-adaptive randomizations (CARs) with imperfect subject compliance. Our regression-adjusted estimators, which are based on the doubly robust moment for local average treatment effects, are consistent and asymptotically normal even with heterogeneous probability of assignment and misspecified regression adjustments. We propose an optimal but potentially misspecified linear…

BISCUIT：从二元交互中学习因果表征AI 解读

Identifying the causal variables of an environment and how to intervene on them is of core value in applications such as robotics and embodied AI. While an agent can commonly interact with the environment and may implicitly perturb the behavior of some of these causal variables, often the targets it affects remain unknown. In this paper, we show that causal variables can still be identified for many common setups, e.g., additive Gaussian noise models, if the agent's…

用于右删失配对生存结局直接比较的非参数相对治疗效应AI 解读

A very classical problem in statistics is to test the stochastic superiority of one distribution to another. However, many existing approaches are developed for independent samples and, moreover, do not take censored data into account. We develop a new estimand-driven method to compare the effectiveness of two treatments in the context of right-censored survival data with matched pairs. With the help of competing risks techniques, the so-called relative treatment effect is…

将处理效应推广和迁移至目标总体的一步加权AI 解读

The problem of generalization and transportation of treatment effect estimates from a study sample to a target population is central to empirical research and statistical methodology. In both randomized experiments and observational studies, weighting methods are often used with this objective. Traditional methods construct the weights by separately modeling the treatment assignment and study selection probabilities and then multiplying functions (e.g., inverses) of their…

有限个聚类下分位数过程的推断AI 解读

I introduce a generic method for inference on entire quantile and regression quantile processes in the presence of a finite number of large and arbitrarily heterogeneous clusters. The method asymptotically controls size by generating statistics that exhibit enough distributional symmetry such that randomization tests can be applied. The randomization test does not require ex-ante matching of clusters, is free of user-chosen parameters, and performs well at conventional…