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贝叶斯加性回归树的稳健半参数推断AI 解读

Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) provide a class of flexible nonparametric regressions in machine learning. Their rich tree-based structure can generate non-Donsker classes of regression functions. We study posterior inference for the population mean under missing at random. We derive a new Bernstein-von Mises (BvM) theorem showing that even a one-step posterior based on BART and Bayesian-bootstrap reweighting retains a non-negligible bias term in the non-Donsker…

逆向混杂分析：精确量化混杂影响AI 解读

The presence of unmeasured confounding factors during the collection of observational data may lead to biased estimates of the effect of an exposure on an outcome. Consequently, a central problem in causal inference based on observational data is sensitivity analysis with respect to unmeasured confounding. Existing sensitivity analyses generally focus on worst-case bounds. We propose an exact method for quantifying the significance of confounding, defined here in terms of…

将随机试验的相对效应汇总量迁移至已治疗患者：乳腺癌内分泌治疗应用AI 解读

Randomised trials often report relative treatment effects, such as risk ratios and hazard ratios, for trial populations. Clinical decision-making, however, often benefits from estimates of absolute treatment effects in the population eligible for treatment. Trial participants may not represent this target population well, and restrictions on access to individual participant trial data can further complicate absolute effect estimation. Routine care data are often…

长话短说：因果机器学习中的遗漏变量偏误AI 解读

We develop a general theory of omitted variable bias for a wide range of common causal parameters, including (but not limited to) averages of potential outcomes, average treatment effects, average causal derivatives, and policy effects from covariate shifts. Our theory applies to nonparametric models, while naturally allowing for (semi-)parametric restrictions (such as partial linearity) when such assumptions are made. We show how simple plausibility judgments on the maximum…

利用代理变量调整的靶向干预因果发现AI 解读

Randomized perturbations can reveal downstream responses without identifying which causal relationships are direct. Conditioning on intermediate responses may induce associations through unmeasured common causes, even when the source is randomized. We introduce Proxy-Adjusted Balanced Masking (PABM), a nonparametric framework for recovering directed acyclic graphs from targeted interventions, response data, and recorded proxies. PABM uses valid target-specific interventions…

调查实验的精细分层AI 解读

This paper studies a two-stage model of experimentation, where the researcher first samples representative experimental participants from an eligible pool, then assigns each sampled unit to treatment or control, using matched $k$-tuples randomization at both stages. To implement such designs, we develop a fast algorithm for matching units into $k$-tuples for any $k \ge 2$ and any dimension of covariates. By surveying 200 recent experimental working papers, we estimate that…

利用机器学习实现分布平衡：以真实世界数据增强临床试验AI 解读

In clinical trials, randomization of treatment and control groups is typically used to ensure the groups have similar covariate distributions on average, resulting in unbiased causal effect estimation. Such balanced covariate distributions are hard to achieve in practice, however, due to recruitment costs, patient dropouts, and more. One possible solution to this problem is to include control patients from external, real world databases. In this paper, we propose DBML, a…

tteICE：估计两组试验中伴随中间事件的事件时间处理效应的 R 包AI 解读

Evaluating treatment effects in clinical trials with time-to-event outcomes is complicated by intercurrent events (ICEs), e.g., treatment discontinuation or competing events. While the ICH E9 (R1) addendum outlines five strategies to address these challenges, accessible software implementing these methods is limited. This article introduces the \pkg{tteICE} package for \proglang{R}, which implements five strategies to facilitate valid causal inference in the presence of…

通过邻域排除交叉拟合实现网络干扰下的无偏处理效应估计AI 解读

Without interference, cross-fitting enables flexible covariate adjustment while preserving finite-sample unbiasedness under independent unit-level randomization. Under network interference, out-of-sample prediction alone no longer guarantees unbiasedness: assignments entering evaluation-fold Horvitz--Thompson weights may also affect outcomes in the training sample, inducing dependence between fitted predictions and those weights. We develop neighborhood-excluded…

超越单调性的异质幸存者平均因果效应：机械通气临床试验应用AI 解读

Clinical trials in critical care often evaluate outcomes that are truncated by death, such as time to discharge alive, for which treatment effects are not well defined among patients who would not survive under one or both treatment strategies. Principal stratification provides a natural framework for defining survivor causal effects, but existing approaches often rely on monotonicity assumptions that may be implausible in settings where treatment can affect survival in…

向量值分布强化学习的策略评估：希尔伯特空间嵌入方法AI 解读

We propose Kernel Embedding Distributional Reinforcement Learning (KE-DRL) an offline method to estimate kernel mean embeddings of conditional multivariate return distributions from observed offline trajectories with continuous state-action inputs and vector-valued rewards. KE-DRL approximates the conditional embedding and estimates its a finite-dictionary representation coefficients through a maximum mean discrepancy Bellman criterion. For a regular class of return…

基于大语言模型文本测量的再犯预测、同伴效应估计与预测辅助推断AI 解读

We provide a new framework for estimating peer effects when outcomes are multivariate behavioral measures derived from written text using an LLM and the network formation is endogenous. We obtain LLM embeddings and zero shot classification of more than 200,000 written exchanges among residents of low-security correctional facilities. We find that LLM embeddings improve out-of-sample recidivism prediction by up to 30% over pre-entry covariates alone using LASSO and LoRA…

多种处理版本下的识别与估计：混合专家方法AI 解读

The Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) includes the condition that there are no multiple versions of treatment in causal inference. Though we could not control the implementation of treatment in observational studies, multiple versions may exist in the treatment. It has been pointed out that ignoring such multiple versions of treatment can lead to biased estimates of causal effects, but a causal inference framework that explicitly deals with the unbiased…

两阶段抽样下加权处理效应的有效估计AI 解读

Two-phase sampling offers a practical way to collect costly confounders only in a subsample while retaining inexpensive information for a larger cohort. In observational causal studies, however, phase-2 selection can distort estimation of population causal effects if the sampling mechanism is ignored, and available phase-1 information may also be exploited to improve efficiency. Yet efficiency theory for causal estimands under such designs remains limited, particularly…

双侧随机化设计中的因果推断：析因回归、双向聚类与协变量调整AI 解读

We study randomized experiments involving two interacting populations, such as buyers and sellers in a marketplace. In the two-sided experiments we consider, we randomize the two populations separately and independently. For a pair consisting of one member from each population, the two assignments jointly determine one of four exposure conditions. Under a local interference assumption, we consider a broad class of linear estimands, including total, interaction, and buyer-…

有序结果下的正交政策学习AI 解读

Policy learning methods based on conditional average treatment effects can obscure subpopulation heterogeneity when applied to ordinal outcomes. We develop a policy learning framework for ordinal outcomes with heterogeneous utilities for individuals who strictly benefit from treatment and those who do not. Since the probability of strict benefit is only partially identified without further conditions, we adopt a minimax strategy which minimizes the worst-case regret over the…

利用工具变量推断广义主分层条件下的处理效应AI 解读

We propose a general approach to inference for a broad class of models that arise in the analysis of treatment effects with discrete-valued treatments and instruments and a general-valued outcome. In addition to instrument exogeneity, the main substantive assumption in our class of models rules out certain response types by assuming that they occur with probability zero. Here, the response type refers to the vector of potential outcomes and potential treatments, and we refer…

干扰与复杂实验设计下的优化方差估计AI 解读

Unbiased and consistent variance estimators generally do not exist for design-based treatment effect estimators because experimenters never observe more than one potential outcome for any unit. The problem is exacerbated by interference and complex experimental designs. Experimenters must accept conservative variance estimators in these settings, but they can strive to minimize the conservativeness. In this paper, we show that the task of constructing a minimally…

随机试验异质性处理效应估计：风险建模与效应建模比较AI 解读

Introduction Risk modelling (RM) and treatment effect modelling (EM) are two approaches to build models to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects from randomized control trials (RCT). RM is a two-stage approach; it estimates a predicted baseline risk at the first stage and then includes it as the only effect modifier in a regression model in the second stage. EM is a full treatment interaction multivariable model. Both approaches have theoretical advantages and…

处理效应估计中的综合指数AI 解读

This paper studies the practice of combining multiple outcomes into a summary index to estimate a causal effect. For common estimators and index constructions, the estimate equals a weighted sum of the estimated effects on the components, with weights that are implicit and rarely reported. The paper derives the weights and shows that, for inverse-covariance-weighted indices, they can be negative and unrestricted in magnitude, so the index effect can have the opposite sign to…

局部差分隐私下渐近随时有效的分位数推断AI 解读

Sequential quantile inference is difficult under local differential privacy because every record is randomized before reaching the analyst and the limiting quantile variance depends on an unknown density. We develop an online procedure that combines randomized response with dynamically chained parallel stochastic gradient descent (P-SGD). The resulting Polyak--Ruppert estimator admits a strong Gaussian approximation. A cross-chain quadratic statistic, computed entirely from…

连接局部与总体因果效应：近端工具变量方法AI 解读

Instrumental variable (IV) methods address treatment endogeneity, but with non-compliance and heterogeneous treatment effects a binary instrument generally identifies the local average treatment effect (LATE) among compliers rather than the population average treatment effect (ATE). When treatment effects and compliance probabilities are heterogeneous and dependent through latent factors, the ATE need not be identified by IV variation alone. We develop a proximal…

用贝叶斯加性回归树评估观察数据中的治疗获益预测器AI 解读

A treatment benefit predictor (TBP) is an algorithm that maps a patient's characteristics to their putative benefit from a given treatment, which can be used to inform treatment decisions. However, a TBP must be evaluated in the target population before being adopted for patient care. When only observational data are available, evaluating TBPs requires standard causal identification assumptions, as treatment assignment in such settings is not random. We obtain the posterior…

目标函数平衡：利用策略性不平衡估计因果效应AI 解读

When estimating the average treatment effect of a binary intervention with weights, investigators are often burdened with how best to leave imbalance in the distributions of observed covariates. This requires that investigators proceed cautiously, as imbalance in key (nonlinear transformations of) covariates potentially introduces bias into the ultimate estimated effect. This paper introduces Targeted Function Balancing (TFB), a flexible covariate balancing weights approach…