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利用边际矩信息识别并界定因果效应的中心矩AI 解读

Evaluating the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is a central objective in causal inference. While the average causal effect summarizes the mean impact of treatment, the central moments of the individual causal effect (ICE) characterize the shape of the ICE distribution, thereby revealing the extent and structure of treatment effect heterogeneity across individuals. This paper investigates the identification and bounding of the central moments of the ICE using only…

因果重叠效应：累积固定效应方法AI 解读

Social scientists often ask about the effect of increasing one's duration of exposure to a social context on one's outcomes, i.e. the overlap effect. Past studies adopted a unidimensional treatment effect framework to estimate the effect of overlap, imposing important restrictions. In this paper, we propose a new causal framework of multidimensional treatments where the overlap effects include both the duration and the content of overlap, under which, for instance, the…

安慰剂断点设计AI 解读

Standard regression discontinuity design (RDD) models rely on the continuity of expected potential outcomes at the cutoff. The standard continuity assumption can be violated by strategic manipulation of the running variable, which is realistic when the cutoff is widely known and when the treatment of interest is a social program or government benefit. In this work, we identify the treatment effect despite such a violation, by leveraging a placebo treatment and a placebo…

忽略面板非线性导致的弱工具变量：Super Learner 控制函数估计AI 解读

A triangular structural panel data model with additive separable individual-specific effects is used to model the causal effect of a covariate on an outcome variable when there are unobservable confounders with some of them time-invariant. In this setup, a linear specification for the reduced-form equation might be problematic when the conditional mean of the endogenous covariate and the instrumental variables is nonlinear in the population. The reason is that ignoring the…

因果估计中的两层不稳定性AI 解读

There is a precise sense in which drawing causal inferences from observational data is hard, even when identifiability is assumed. In particular, Robins and Ritov (1997) and Robins et al. (2003) showed that causal effects can be discontinuous as a function of the data distribution: two arbitrarily close data distributions might correspond to different causal effects. This is a fact independent of the choice of estimator; however, not all estimators are equally unstable. Our…

固定簇内重复抽取不同个体以提高纵向估计精度：DISC 设计AI 解读

Background: Longitudinal studies often involve repeated cluster sampling of a population at multiple time points, such as in difference-in-differences (DID) studies. Although cohort designs typically lead to more efficient estimators relative to repeated cross-sectional (RCS) designs, they are often impractical. Methods: We describe the DISC (Different Individuals, Same Clusters) design, a sampling scheme that improves the precision of estimators in these settings. The DISC…

核工具变量回归的一致推断AI 解读

Instrumental variable regression is a foundational tool for causal analysis across the social and biomedical sciences. Recent advances use kernel methods to estimate nonparametric causal relationships, with general data types, while retaining a simple closed-form expression. Empirical researchers ultimately need reliable inference on causal estimates; however, uniform confidence sets for the method remain unavailable. To fill this gap, we develop valid and sharp confidence…

随机饱和度设计中的随机化检验AI 解读

Randomized saturation designs are widely used to study spillover effects in clustered populations. In these designs, clusters are first assigned to treatment saturation levels, and units are then randomized within clusters according to the assigned saturation. This paper develops randomization tests for such experiments under several null hypotheses that arise naturally in spillover analysis. For a fixed pair of saturation levels, we first study two individual-level…

AMP 艾滋病预防试验中地区特异性生存效应的定向数据融合AI 解读

The Antibody Mediated Prevention (AMP) trials opened a new scientific frontier by showing that passively administered monoclonal broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) could prevent HIV-1 acquisition. Conducted across multiple geographic regions, including the United States, Brazil, Peru, Switzerland, and sub-Saharan Africa, the AMP trials revealed substantial regional heterogeneity in treatment efficacy. These differences, together with privacy and regulatory limits on…

目标函数的目标化高度自适应Lasso最小损失估计AI 解读

We propose a Targeted Highly Adaptive Lasso for estimation of non-pathwise differentiable functional parameters such as the dose-response curve (DRC) for continuous exposure. We assume the target function lies in the $k$-th order smoothness class used to define the $k$-th order Highly Adaptive Lasso (HAL), which can be well approximated by linear spans of $k$-th order spline basis functions. We construct a projection of the true target function onto a large finite…

具有设计型方差的交叉拟合调查加权 TMLEAI 解读

Cross-fitting is not a refinement of survey-weighted causal machine learning but, once the nuisances are flexible, what restores valid inference. We study the population average treatment effect under a stratified multistage design, estimated by a survey-aware targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) whose variance is obtained by Taylor-series linearization of the influence function, treating the primary sampling unit as the replication unit. Our central result is that…

远程办公：数字产品创新的推动力还是阻碍？AI 解读

As firms adopt divergent policies regarding work-from-home (WFH), the implications of remote work for collaborative and interdependent outcomes such as digital product innovation remain uncertain. This study examines how remote work adoption affects continuous digital product innovation using a panel dataset of mobile applications. We identify firm-level remote work adoption from job postings data and estimate its effects on app innovation using a staggered…

样本个体数为一时的实验设计AI 解读

N-of-1 trials, or time-series experiments, are widely used in clinical research and online platforms. Yet the theoretically optimal design for estimating many treatment effects remains unclear. We propose a simple Markovian framework for experimental design in which the treatment assignment process is governed by possibly time-varying transition matrices. This formulation encompasses many existing N-of-1 designs and provides a principled way to control temporal dependence in…

普吉特海湾地区在线购物行为的伪面板双重差分分析AI 解读

Online shopping is a growing trend, particularly following the COVID-19 lock-downs enacted by many cities. Understanding these trends requires robust panel dat methods. However, panel data (i.e., with repeated measurements of the same observational units) are often unavailable. In this study, we use a propensity score weighting (PSW) approach to adjust repeated cross-sectional travel diary surveys collected in the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) region. The most common…

对话的因果效应是什么？AI 中介对话的目标量与推断AI 解读

Political scientists increasingly use conversations as treatments. Sometimes these conversations are conducted by humans, but often and increasingly they will be conducted by generative artificial intelligence (AI). AI makes it possible to scale treatments that are responsive, and rich in real-world relevance. But this same interactivity creates specific challenges for causal inference. A respondent may be randomly assigned to a conversational condition, but the conversation…

通过多重识别实现收缩估计AI 解读

We propose an empirical Bayes framework for combining estimators obtained from multiple identification functionals associated with the same estimand. We adaptively pool a collection of asymptotically linear estimators, each of which may target a different parameter because of violations of their identification assumptions. Although all estimators are computed from the same sample and are therefore dependent, we show that a working independence construction preserves…

CaSPECT：用有向谱聚类发现因果同质子群AI 解读

We propose \textbf{CaSPECT}, a causal spectral clustering framework for discovering causally homogeneous subgroups from observational data. Rather than clustering in covariate space, CaSPECT defines similarity through the topology of a learned directed acyclic graph (DAG); a bootstrap-stabilised PC algorithm recovers the causal skeleton; a novel \emph{Orientation Validation Score} (OVS) combines PC bootstrap evidence with DirectLiNGAM to orient edges robustly; directed edges…

结局适配的自动去偏机器学习AI 解读

Parameters of interest in causal inference, such as treatment or policy effects, can often be expressed as linear functionals of an outcome regression function. Automatic debiased machine learning (AutoDML) is a unified framework for obtaining asymptotically normal estimators of such parameters, which requires estimation of both a regression function and a Riesz representer. Existing AutoDML neural network architectures, such as RieszNet and MADNet, use a shared intermediate…

允许工具变量潜在无效的可能性理论回归AI 解读

Instrumental variable regression is a common approach for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, identifying valid instruments is often difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on possibility theory that performs posterior inference on the treatment effect, conditional on a user-specified set of potential violations of the instrument exogeneity assumption. Our method can provide valid results even when only a single,…

存在未测量处理诱发混杂的近端中介分析AI 解读

Mediation analysis provides a central framework for elucidating causal mechanisms, yet its application is often impeded by treatment-induced confounding, under which the widely used natural mediation effects are generally unidentifiable. Interventional effects have been proposed as an alternative when these confounders are observable; however, identifying and estimating interventional effects remains challenging when confounders are unmeasured. In this paper, we address this…

结局子抽样纵向两阶段设计的目标最大似然估计AI 解读

We consider efficient estimation of causal parameters in longitudinal two-stage designs with outcome subsampling, motivated by resampling designs in HIV-related mortality studies. In these studies, many participants become lost to follow-up; resampling designs address this by tracing a subset of lost individuals to ascertain their outcomes. Analyses often use inverse-probability-weighted Kaplan-Meier (wKM) estimators that discard longitudinal covariate information and suffer…

平行趋势假设下的结构嵌套均值模型AI 解读

We link and extend two approaches to estimating time-varying treatment effects on repeated continuous outcomes--time-varying Difference in Differences (DiD; see Roth et al. (2023) and Chaisemartin et al. (2023) for reviews) and Structural Nested Mean Models (SNMMs; see Vansteelandt and Joffe (2014) for a review). In particular, we show that SNMMs, previously known to be nonparametrically identified under a no unobserved confounding assumption, are also identified under a…

用库存生命周期价值衡量机会成本AI 解读

Measuring the long-term opportunity cost of interventions remains a critical challenge in e-commerce A/B testing. While strategic levers (such as dynamic pricing, ranking algorithms, and promotional campaigns) trigger shifts in consumer behaviour that persist over months, operational constraints necessitate fast decision-making cycles that are typically limited to weekly experimental windows. Standard metrics like revenue and conversion are inherently short-sighted, biasing…

随机临床试验中协变量调整 g-computation 的偏差减少AI 解读

G-computation is a powerful method for estimating unconditional treatment effects with covariate adjustment in randomized clinical trials. It typically relies on fitting canonical generalized linear models. However, this could be problematic when the sample size or event number is small relative to the number of covariates. Common issues include the underestimation of the variance and the potential nonexistence of maximum likelihood estimators. Bias reduction methods are…