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他汀使用与二型糖尿病：基于电子健康记录识别最易受影响亚组AI 解读

There have been increased concerns that the use of statins, one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for treating coronary artery disease, is potentially associated with the increased risk of new-onset type II diabetes (T2D). Nevertheless, to date, there is no robust evidence supporting as to whether and what kind of populations are indeed vulnerable for developing T2D after taking statins. In this case study, leveraging the biobank and electronic health record data in the…

因果与结构效应的自动去偏机器学习AI 解读

Many causal and structural effects depend on regressions. Examples include policy effects, average derivatives, regression decompositions, average treatment effects, causal mediation, and parameters of economic structural models. The regressions may be high dimensional, making machine learning useful. Plugging machine learners into identifying equations can lead to poor inference due to bias from regularization and/or model selection. This paper gives automatic debiasing for…

利用正则化 Riesz 表示元对全局与局部参数进行去偏机器学习AI 解读

We provide adaptive inference methods, based on $\ell_1$ regularization, for regular (semi-parametric) and non-regular (nonparametric) linear functionals of the conditional expectation function. Examples of regular functionals include average treatment effects, policy effects, and derivatives. Examples of non-regular functionals include average treatment effects, policy effects, and derivatives conditional on a covariate subvector fixed at a point. We construct a Neyman…

具有有限样本保证的简明通用去偏机器学习定理AI 解读

Debiased machine learning is a meta algorithm based on bias correction and sample splitting to calculate confidence intervals for functionals, i.e. scalar summaries, of machine learning algorithms. For example, an analyst may desire the confidence interval for a treatment effect estimated with a neural network. We provide a nonasymptotic debiased machine learning theorem that encompasses any global or local functional of any machine learning algorithm that satisfies a few…

疫情期间的政策评估AI 解读

National and local governments have implemented a large number of policies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Evaluating the effects of these policies, both on the number of Covid-19 cases as well as on other economic outcomes is a key ingredient for policymakers to be able to determine which policies are most effective as well as the relative costs and benefits of particular policies. In this paper, we consider the relative merits of common identification strategies that…

稀疏固定结构高斯贝叶斯网络的学习AI 解读

Gaussian Bayesian networks (a.k.a. linear Gaussian structural equation models) are widely used to model causal interactions among continuous variables. In this work, we study the problem of learning a fixed-structure Gaussian Bayesian network up to a bounded error in total variation distance. We analyze the commonly used node-wise least squares regression (LeastSquares) and prove that it has a near-optimal sample complexity. We also study a couple of new algorithms for the…

通过预测值进行预测：预判预测的施为效应AI 解读

Predictions about people, such as their expected educational achievement or their credit risk, can be performative and shape the outcome that they aim to predict. Understanding the causal effect of these predictions on the eventual outcomes is crucial for foreseeing the implications of future predictive models and selecting which models to deploy. However, this causal estimation task poses unique challenges: model predictions are usually deterministic functions of input…

线性混合模型中随机量的有效预测AI 解读

In applications of linear mixed-effects models, experimenters often desire uncertainty quantification for random quantities, like predicted treatment effects for unobserved individuals or groups. For example, consider an agricultural experiment measuring a response on animals receiving different treatments and residing on different farms. A farmer deciding whether to adopt the treatment is most interested in farm-level uncertainty quantification, for example, the range of…

简化版 BART 的混合时间下界AI 解读

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a popular Bayesian non-parametric regression algorithm. The posterior is a distribution over sums of decision trees, and predictions are made by averaging approximate samples from the posterior. The combination of strong predictive performance and the ability to provide uncertainty measures has led BART to be commonly used in the social sciences, biostatistics, and causal inference. BART uses Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to…

非参数模型下分回合部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程的离策略评估AI 解读

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) for episodic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with continuous states. Motivated by the recently proposed proximal causal inference framework, we develop a non-parametric identification result for estimating the policy value via a sequence of so-called V-bridge functions with the help of time-dependent proxy variables. We then develop a fitted-Q-evaluation-type algorithm to estimate V-bridge functions…

协变量不平衡趋零且协变量数量增长时的再随机化AI 解读

Completely randomized experiments have been the gold standard for drawing causal inference because they can balance all potential confounding on average. However, they may suffer from unbalanced covariates for realized treatment assignments. Rerandomization, a design that rerandomizes the treatment assignment until a prespecified covariate balance criterion is met, has recently got attention due to its easy implementation, improved covariate balance and more efficient…

稀疏机制变化假说下异质环境中的因果发现AI 解读

Machine learning approaches commonly rely on the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. In reality, however, this assumption is almost always violated due to distribution shifts between environments. Although valuable learning signals can be provided by heterogeneous data from changing distributions, it is also known that learning under arbitrary (adversarial) changes is impossible. Causality provides a useful framework for modeling distribution…

主动贝叶斯因果推断AI 解读

Causal discovery and causal reasoning are classically treated as separate and consecutive tasks: one first infers the causal graph, and then uses it to estimate causal effects of interventions. However, such a two-stage approach is uneconomical, especially in terms of actively collected interventional data, since the causal query of interest may not require a fully-specified causal model. From a Bayesian perspective, it is also unnatural, since a causal query (e.g., the…

无需网络知识的干扰下因果推断：分阶段随机推广设计AI 解读

Randomized experiments are widely used to estimate causal effects across a variety of domains. However, classical causal inference approaches rely on critical independence assumptions that are violated by network interference, when the treatment of one individual influences the outcomes of others. All existing approaches require at least approximate knowledge of the network, which may be unavailable and costly to collect. We consider the task of estimating the total…

多弱工具变量下的条件似然比检验AI 解读

This paper extends validity of the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test developed by Moreira (2003) to instrumental variable regression models with unknown error variance and many weak instruments. In this setting, we argue that the conventional CLR test with estimated error variance loses exact similarity and is asymptotically invalid. We propose a modified critical value function for the likelihood ratio (LR) statistic with estimated error variance, and prove that this…

时间序列中 PC 算法及其时间感知扩展的一致性因果推断AI 解读

The estimator of a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) with the PC algorithm is known to be consistent based on independent and identically distributed samples. In this paper, we consider the scenario when the multivariate samples are identically distributed but not independent. A common example is a stationary multivariate time series. We show that under a standard set of assumptions on the underlying time series involving $ρ$-mixing, the PC algorithm is consistent in this…

从连续时间动力学模型中挖掘因果结构：海啸预测应用AI 解读

Continuous-time dynamics models, such as neural ordinary differential equations, have enabled the modeling of underlying dynamics in time-series data and accurate forecasting. However, parameterization of dynamics using a neural network makes it difficult for humans to identify causal structures in the data. In consequence, this opaqueness hinders the use of these models in the domains where capturing causal relationships carries the same importance as accurate predictions,…

用于后门与前门调整的神经均值嵌入方法AI 解读

We consider the estimation of average and counterfactual treatment effects, under two settings: back-door adjustment and front-door adjustment. The goal in both cases is to recover the treatment effect without having an access to a hidden confounder. This objective is attained by first estimating the conditional mean of the desired outcome variable given relevant covariates (the "first stage" regression), and then taking the (conditional) expectation of this function as a…

样本约束下的处理效应估计AI 解读

Treatment effect estimation is a fundamental problem in causal inference. We focus on designing efficient randomized controlled trials, to accurately estimate the effect of some treatment on a population of $n$ individuals. In particular, we study sample-constrained treatment effect estimation, where we must select a subset of $s \ll n$ individuals from the population to experiment on. This subset must be further partitioned into treatment and control groups. Algorithms for…

边际结构模型的敏感性分析AI 解读

We introduce several methods for assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding in marginal structural models; importantly we allow treatments to be discrete or continuous, static or time-varying. We consider three sensitivity models: a propensity-based model, an outcome-based model, and a subset confounding model, in which only a fraction of the population is subject to unmeasured confounding. In each case we develop efficient estimators and confidence intervals for bounds…

scpi：合成控制方法的不确定性量化AI 解读

The synthetic control method offers a way to quantify the effect of an intervention using weighted averages of untreated units to approximate the counterfactual outcome that the treated unit(s) would have experienced in the absence of the intervention. This method is useful for program evaluation and causal inference in observational studies. We introduce the software package scpi for prediction and inference using synthetic controls, implemented in Python, R, and Stata. For…

无序多值处理的工具变量：理论与专业学习收益证据AI 解读

We revisit the identification argument of Kirkeboen et al. (2016) who showed how one may combine instruments for multiple unordered treatments with information about individuals' ranking of these treatments to achieve identification while allowing for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in treatment effects. We show that the key assumptions underlying their identification argument have testable implications. We also provide a new characterization of the bias that may…

随机实验中回归调整的统一分析AI 解读

Regression adjustment is broadly applied in randomized trials under the premise that it usually improves the precision of a treatment effect estimator. However, previous work has shown that this is not always true. To further understand this phenomenon, we develop a unified comparison of the asymptotic variance of a class of linear regression-adjusted estimators. Our analysis is based on the classical theory for linear regression with heteroscedastic errors and thus does not…

未观测混杂下利用负向对照的因果推断：极小极大学习方法AI 解读

We study the estimation of causal parameters when not all confounders are observed and instead negative controls are available. Recent work has shown how these can enable identification and efficient estimation via two so-called bridge functions. In this paper, we tackle the primary challenge to causal inference using negative controls: the identification and estimation of these bridge functions. Previous work has relied on completeness conditions on these functions to…