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存在未观测混杂时的序贯去混杂因果推断AI 解读

Using observational data to estimate the effect of a treatment is a powerful tool for decision-making when randomized experiments are infeasible or costly. However, observational data often yields biased estimates of treatment effects, since treatment assignment can be confounded by unobserved variables. A remedy is offered by deconfounding methods that adjust for such unobserved confounders. In this paper, we develop the Sequential Deconfounder, a method that enables…

利用 Wasserstein 空间方差最小化进行不变因果预测AI 解读

Selecting powerful predictors for an outcome is a cornerstone task for machine learning. However, some types of questions can only be answered by identifying the predictors that causally affect the outcome. A recent approach to this causal inference problem leverages the invariance property of a causal mechanism across differing experimental environments (Peters et al., 2016; Heinze-Deml et al., 2018). This method, invariant causal prediction (ICP), has a substantial…

个体化处理效应估计的集成方法AI 解读

In many medical and business applications, researchers are interested in estimating individualized treatment effects using data from a randomized experiment. For example in medical applications, doctors learn the treatment effects from clinical trials and in technology companies, researchers learn them from A/B testing experiments. Although dozens of machine learning models have been proposed for this task, it is challenging to determine which model will be best for the…

基于 Copula 熵条件独立检验的因果域适应AI 解读

Domain Adaptation (DA) is a typical problem in machine learning that aims to transfer the model trained on source domain to target domain with different distribution. Causal DA is a special case of DA that solves the problem from the view of causality. It embeds the probabilistic relationships in multiple domains in a larger causal structure network of a system and tries to find the causal source (or intervention) on the system as the reason of distribution drifts of the…

有能力共同基金的筛选：依赖结构下的错误发现控制AI 解读

Selecting skilled mutual funds through the multiple testing framework has received increasing attention from finance researchers and statisticians. The intercept $α$ of Carhart four-factor model is commonly used to measure the true performance of mutual funds, and positive $α$'s are considered as skilled. We observe that the standardized OLS estimates of $α$'s across the funds possess strong dependence and nonnormality structures, indicating that the conventional multiple…

条件独立左截断下的生存参数估计AI 解读

Databases derived from electronic health records (EHRs) are commonly subject to left truncation, a type of selection bias induced due to patients needing to survive long enough to satisfy certain entry criteria. Standard methods to adjust for left truncation bias rely on an assumption of marginal independence between entry and survival times, which may not always be satisfied in practice. In this work, we examine how a weaker assumption of conditional independence can result…

中位数最优处理规则AI 解读

Optimal treatment regimes are personalized policies for making a treatment decision based on subject characteristics, with the policy chosen to maximize some value. It is common to aim to maximize the mean outcome in the population, via a regime assigning treatment only to those whose mean outcome is higher under treatment versus control. However, the mean can be an unstable measure of centrality, resulting in imprecise statistical procedures, as well as unrobust decisions…

断点回归设计AI 解读

The Regression Discontinuity (RD) design is one of the most widely used non-experimental methods for causal inference and program evaluation. Over the last two decades, statistical and econometric methods for RD analysis have expanded and matured, and there is now a large number of methodological results for RD identification, estimation, inference, and validation. We offer a curated review of this methodological literature organized around the two most popular frameworks…

交互固定效应面板模型中处理效应的置信区间AI 解读

We consider the construction of confidence intervals for treatment effects estimated using panel models with interactive fixed effects. We first use the factor-based matrix completion technique proposed by Bai and Ng (2021) to estimate the treatment effects, and then use bootstrap method to construct confidence intervals of the treatment effects for treated units at each post-treatment period. Our construction of confidence intervals requires neither specific distributional…

无限变差温和稳定 Lévy 模型的估计AI 解读

We propose a new method for the estimation of a semiparametric tempered stable Lévy model. The estimation procedure combines iteratively an approximate semiparametric method of moment estimator, Truncated Realized Quadratic Variations (TRQV), and a newly found small-time high-order approximation for the optimal threshold of the TRQV of tempered stable processes. The method is tested via simulations to estimate the volatility and the Blumenthal-Getoor index of the generalized…

在相对效应可迁移假设下识别新目标人群的处理效应AI 解读

Epidemiologists and applied statisticians often believe that relative effect measures conditional on covariates, such as risk ratios and mean ratios, are ``transportable'' across populations. Here, we examine the identification of causal effects in a target population using an assumption that conditional relative effect measures (e.g., conditional risk ratios or mean ratios) are transportable from a trial to the target population. We show that transportability for relative…

利用路径签名比率估计对高成本时间序列模拟器进行摊销式无似然推断AI 解读

Simulation models of complex dynamics in the natural and social sciences commonly lack a tractable likelihood function, rendering traditional likelihood-based statistical inference impossible. Recent advances in machine learning have introduced novel algorithms for estimating otherwise intractable likelihood functions using a likelihood ratio trick based on binary classifiers. Consequently, efficient likelihood approximations can be obtained whenever good probabilistic…

动态因子模型脉冲响应函数的估计：一种新参数化AI 解读

We propose a new parametrization for the estimation and identification of the impulse-response functions (IRFs) of dynamic factor models (DFMs). The theoretical contribution of this paper concerns the problem of observational equivalence between different IRFs, which implies non-identification of the IRF parameters without further restrictions. We show how the previously proposed minimal identification conditions are nested in the new framework and can be further augmented…

异质性因果效应的差分隐私估计AI 解读

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects in domains such as healthcare or social science often involves sensitive data where protecting privacy is important. We introduce a general meta-algorithm for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) with differential privacy (DP) guarantees. Our meta-algorithm can work with simple, single-stage CATE estimators such as S-learner and more complex multi-stage estimators such as DR and R-learner. We perform a tight…

含噪协变量下的部分识别：稳健优化方法AI 解读

Causal inference from observational datasets often relies on measuring and adjusting for covariates. In practice, measurements of the covariates can often be noisy and/or biased, or only measurements of their proxies may be available. Directly adjusting for these imperfect measurements of the covariates can lead to biased causal estimates. Moreover, without additional assumptions, the causal effects are not point-identifiable due to the noise in these measurements. To this…

工具变量分位数回归的第一阶段表示AI 解读

This paper develops a first-stage linear regression representation for the instrumental variables (IV) quantile regression (QR) model. The quantile first-stage is analogous to the least squares case, i.e., a linear projection of the endogenous variables on the instruments and other exogenous covariates, with the difference that the QR case is a weighted projection. The weights are given by the conditional density function of the innovation term in the QR structural model,…

平稳结构向量自回归模型中的长期风险AI 解读

This paper introduces a local-to-unity/small sigma process for a stationary time series with strong persistence and non-negligible long run risk. This process represents the stationary long run component in an unobserved short- and long-run components model involving different time scales. More specifically, the short run component evolves in the calendar time and the long run component evolves in an ultra long time scale. We develop the methods of estimation and long run…

抗模型误设信息准则的多变量扩展AI 解读

The Misspecification-Resistant Information Criterion (MRIC) proposed in [H.-L. Hsu, C.-K. Ing, H. Tong: On model selection from a finite family of possibly misspecified time series models. The Annals of Statistics. 47 (2), 1061--1087 (2019)] is a model selection criterion for univariate parametric time series that enjoys both the property of consistency and asymptotic efficiency. In this article we extend the MRIC to the case where the response is a multivariate time series…

Friedman 检验的图形化方法：矩方法途径AI 解读

Friedman test is a nonparametric method that proposed for analyzing data from a randomized complete block design as a robust alternative to parametric method and widely applied in many fields such as agriculture, biology, business, education, and medicine. After the null hypothesis of no treatment effects is rejected, the post-hoc pairwise comparisons must be applied to identify where the differences occur. As the number of groups increases, the number of required…

利用高斯过程先验处理因果效应估计中的正值性违反AI 解读

In observational studies, causal inference relies on several key identifying assumptions. One identifiability condition is the positivity assumption, which requires the probability of treatment be bounded away from 0 and 1. That is, for every covariate combination, it should be possible to observe both treated and control subjects, i.e., the covariate distributions should overlap between treatment arms. If the positivity assumption is violated, population-level causal…

因果面板模型的双重稳健识别AI 解读

We study identification and estimation of causal effects in settings with panel data. Traditionally researchers follow model-based identification strategies relying on assumptions governing the relation between the potential outcomes and the observed and unobserved confounders. We focus on a different, complementary approach to identification where assumptions are made about the connection between the treatment assignment and the unobserved confounders. Such strategies are…

广告竞价节流与在线广告效果的因果推断AI 解读

Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring, quasi-experimental variation in user-level ad-exposure in digital advertising campaigns. It shows how this variation can be utilized by ad-publishers to identify the causal effect of advertising campaigns. The variation pertains to auction throttling, a…

结构计量中的公平性约束及其工具变量估计应用AI 解读

A supervised machine learning algorithm determines a model from a learning sample that will be used to predict new observations. To this end, it aggregates individual characteristics of the observations of the learning sample. But this information aggregation does not consider any potential selection on unobservables and any status-quo biases which may be contained in the training sample. The latter bias has raised concerns around the so-called \textit{fairness} of machine…

函数型线性回归中枢轴推断的再生核希尔伯特空间方法AI 解读

We develop methodology for testing hypotheses regarding the slope function in functional linear regression for time series via a reproducing kernel Hilbert space approach. In contrast to most of the literature, which considers tests for the exact nullity of the slope function, we are interested in the null hypothesis that the slope function vanishes only approximately, where deviations are measured with respect to the $L^2$-norm. An asymptotically pivotal test is proposed,…