论文检索

同根异叶：面板数据中的时间序列与横截面方法AI 解读

A central goal in social science is to evaluate the causal effect of a policy. One dominant approach is through panel data analysis in which the behaviors of multiple units are observed over time. The information across time and space motivates two general approaches: (i) horizontal regression (i.e., unconfoundedness), which exploits time series patterns, and (ii) vertical regression (e.g., synthetic controls), which exploits cross-sectional patterns. Conventional wisdom…

聚类观测研究的因果匹配估计：海洋保护区与生物多样性AI 解读

Marine conservation preserves fish biodiversity, protects marine and coastal ecosystems, and supports climate resilience and adaptation. Despite the importance of establishing marine protected areas (MPAs), research on the effectiveness of MPAs with different conservation policies is limited due to the lack of quantitative MPA information. In this paper, leveraging a global MPA database, we investigate the causal impact of MPA policies on fish biodiversity. To address…

网络、面板及其他结局矩阵的异质性处理效应AI 解读

We are interested in the distribution of treatment effects for an experiment where units are randomized to a treatment but outcomes are measured for pairs of units. For example, we might measure risk sharing links between households enrolled in a microfinance program, employment relationships between workers and firms exposed to a trade shock, or bids from bidders to items assigned to an auction format. Such a double randomized experimental design may be appropriate when…

利用模型森林估计观测数据的异质性处理效应AI 解读

The estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) has attracted considerable interest in many disciplines, most prominently in medicine and economics. Contemporary research has so far primarily focused on continuous and binary responses where HTEs are traditionally estimated by a linear model, which allows the estimation of constant or heterogeneous effects even under certain model misspecifications. More complex models for survival, count, or ordinal outcomes require…

右删失生存数据中的断点回归设计AI 解读

In this paper the regression discontinuity design is adapted to the survival analysis setting with right-censored data, studied in an intensity based counting process framework. In particular, a local polynomial regression version of the Aalen additive hazards estimator is introduced as an estimator of the difference between two covariate dependent cumulative hazard rate functions. Large-sample theory for this estimator is developed, including confidence intervals that take…

删失结局的随机化检验：重新理解 Logrank 检验AI 解读

Two-sample tests with censored outcomes are a classical topic in statistics with wide use even in cutting edge applications. There are at least two modes of inference used to justify two-sample tests. One is usual superpopulation inference assuming that units are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples from some superpopulation; the other is finite population inference that relies on the random assignments of units into different groups. When randomization…

基于贝叶斯加性回归树的灵活工具变量模型AI 解读

Methods utilizing instrumental variables have been a fundamental statistical approach to estimation in the presence of unmeasured confounding, usually occurring in non-randomized observational data common to fields such as economics and public health. However, such methods usually make constricting linearity and additivity assumptions that are inapplicable to the complex modeling challenges of today. The growing body of observational data being collected will necessitate…

重叠不足时用平衡权重估计已处理者的处理效应AI 解读

Inverse probability weights are commonly used in epidemiology to estimate causal effects in observational studies. Researchers can typically focus on either the average treatment effect or the average treatment effect on the treated with inverse probability weighting estimators. However, when overlap between the treated and control groups is poor, this can produce extreme weights that can result in biased estimates and large variances. One alternative to inverse probability…

将随机试验的生存处理效应推广至目标总体的双重稳健估计AI 解读

In the presence of heterogeneity between the randomized controlled trial (RCT) participants and the target population, evaluating the treatment effect solely based on the RCT often leads to biased quantification of the real-world treatment effect. To address the problem of lack of generalizability for the treatment effect estimated by the RCT sample, we leverage observational studies with large samples that are representative of the target population. This paper concerns…

基于矩阵分布的联合寿命建模AI 解读

Acyclic phase-type (PH) distributions have been a popular tool in survival analysis, thanks to their natural interpretation in terms of ageing towards its inevitable absorption. In this paper, we consider an extension to the bivariate setting for the modelling of joint lifetimes. In contrast to previous models in the literature that were based on a separate estimation of the marginal behavior and the dependence structure through a copula, we propose a new time-inhomogeneous…

DANCE：数据驱动的负对照搜索、验证与因果估计AI 解读

Negative control variables are increasingly used to adjust for unmeasured confounding bias in causal inference using observational data. They are typically identified by subject matter knowledge and there is currently a severe lack of data-driven methods to find negative controls. In this paper, we present a statistical test for discovering negative controls of a special type -- disconnected negative controls -- that can serve as surrogates of the unmeasured confounder, and…

随机实验中的“少数者支配”回归调整AI 解读

Regression adjustment is widely used for the analysis of randomized experiments to improve the estimation efficiency of the treatment effect. This paper reexamines a weighted regression adjustment method termed as tyranny-of-the-minority (ToM), wherein units in the minority group are given greater weights. We demonstrate that the ToM regression adjustment is more robust than Lin 2013's regression adjustment with treatment-covariate interactions, even though these two…

重审倾向得分的核心作用：连接因果机器学习中的平衡与效率AI 解读

About forty years ago, in a now--seminal contribution, Rosenbaum & Rubin (1983) introduced a critical characterization of the propensity score as a central quantity for drawing causal inferences in observational study settings. In the decades since, much progress has been made across several research fronts in causal inference, notably including the re-weighting and matching paradigms. Focusing on the former and specifically on its intersection with machine learning and…

可微分的不变因果发现AI 解读

Learning causal structure from observational data is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. However, the majority of commonly used differentiable causal discovery methods are non-identifiable, turning this problem into a continuous optimization task prone to data biases. In many real-life situations, data is collected from different environments, in which the functional relations remain consistent across environments, while the distribution of additive noises may vary.…

通过重要性加权从条件矩限制学习因果模型AI 解读

We consider learning causal relationships under conditional moment restrictions. Unlike causal inference under unconditional moment restrictions, conditional moment restrictions pose serious challenges for causal inference, especially in high-dimensional settings. To address this issue, we propose a method that transforms conditional moment restrictions to unconditional moment restrictions through importance weighting, using a conditional density ratio estimator. Using this…

网络倾向得分：溢出、同质性与处理选择AI 解读

I establish primitive conditions for unconfoundedness in a coherent model that features heterogeneous treatment effects, spillovers, selection-on-observables, and network formation. I identify average partial effects under minimal exchangeability conditions. If social interactions are also anonymous, I derive a three-dimensional network propensity score, characterize its support conditions, relate it to recent work on network pseudo-metrics, and study extensions. I propose a…

线性泛函的离策略估计：半参数效率的非渐近理论AI 解读

The problem of estimating a linear functional based on observational data is canonical in both the causal inference and bandit literatures. We analyze a broad class of two-stage procedures that first estimate the treatment effect function, and then use this quantity to estimate the linear functional. We prove non-asymptotic upper bounds on the mean-squared error of such procedures: these bounds reveal that in order to obtain non-asymptotically optimal procedures, the error…

裂区设计中的再随机化与协变量调整AI 解读

The split-plot design arises from agricultural sciences with experimental units, also known as subplots, nested within groups known as whole plots. It assigns the whole-plot intervention by a cluster randomization at the whole-plot level and assigns the subplot intervention by a stratified randomization at the subplot level. The randomization mechanism guarantees covariate balance on average at both the whole-plot and subplot levels, and ensures consistent inference of the…

处理开放标签随机对照试验中治疗转换的稳健工具变量方法AI 解读

In a randomized controlled trial, treatment switching (also called contamination or crossover) occurs when a patient initially assigned to one treatment arm changes to another arm during the course of follow-up. Overlooking treatment switching might substantially bias the evaluation of treatment efficacy or safety. To account for treatment switching, instrumental variable (IV) methods by leveraging the initial randomized assignment as an IV serve as natural adjustment…

网络结构未知时随机实验的总体处理效应估计AI 解读

Randomized experiments are widely used to estimate the causal effects of a proposed treatment in many areas of science, from medicine and healthcare to the physical and biological sciences, from the social sciences to engineering, to public policy and to the technology industry at large. Here, we consider situations where classical methods for estimating the total treatment effect on a target population are considerably biased due to confounding network effects, i.e., the…

广义因果森林：在线市场中的异质性处理效应估计AI 解读

Uplift modeling is a rapidly growing approach that utilizes causal inference and machine learning methods to directly estimate the heterogeneous treatment effects, which has been widely applied to various online marketplaces to assist large-scale decision-making in recent years. The existing popular models, like causal forest (CF), are limited to either discrete treatments or posing parametric assumptions on the outcome-treatment relationship that may suffer model…

死亡截断问题的匹配方法AI 解读

Even in a carefully designed randomized trial, outcomes for some study participants can be missing, or more precisely, ill-defined, because participants had died prior to date of outcome collection. This problem, known as truncation by death, means that the treated and untreated are no longer balanced with respect to covariates determining survival. Therefore, researchers often utilize principal stratification and focus on the Survivor Average Causal Effect (SACE). The SACE…

延迟及递减处理效应下的加权风险比估计AI 解读

Non-proportional hazards (NPH) have been observed in confirmatory clinical trials with time to event outcomes. Under NPH, the hazard ratio does not stay constant over time and the log-rank test is no longer the most powerful test. The weighted log-rank test (WLRT) has been introduced to deal with the presence of non-proportionality. We focus our attention on the WLRT and the complementary Cox model based on the time-varying treatment effect proposed by Lin and León (2017)…

以测试分数为运行变量的局部随机化断点回归设计AI 解读

Explanations of the internal validity of regression discontinuity designs (RDD) generally appeal to the idea that RDDs are ``as good as" random near the treatment cut point. Cattaneo, Frandsen, and Titiunik (2015) are the first to take this justification to its full conclusion and propose estimating the RDD local average treatment effect (LATE) the same as one would a randomized experiment. This paper explores the implications of analyzing an RDD as a local random experiment…