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以三维图像为中介的因果中介分析AI 解读

Causal mediation analysis is increasingly abundant in biology, psychology, and epidemiology studies, etc. In particular, with the advent of the big data era, the issue of high-dimensional mediators is becoming more prevalent. In neuroscience, with the widespread application of magnetic resonance technology in the field of brain imaging, studies on image being a mediator emerged. In this study, a novel causal mediation analysis method with a three-dimensional image mediator…

利用异方差噪声模型识别患者特定的疾病根因AI 解读

Complex diseases are caused by a multitude of factors that may differ between patients even within the same diagnostic category. A few underlying root causes may nevertheless initiate the development of disease within each patient. We therefore focus on identifying patient-specific root causes of disease, which we equate to the sample-specific predictivity of the exogenous error terms in a structural equation model. We generalize from the linear setting to the…

高维时间序列的一致因果推断AI 解读

A methodology for high dimensional causal inference in a time series context is introduced. It is assumed that there is a monotonic transformation of the data such that the dynamics of the transformed variables are described by a Gaussian vector autoregressive process. This is tantamount to assume that the dynamics are captured by a Gaussian copula. No knowledge or estimation of the marginal distribution of the data is required. The procedure consistently identifies the…

从混频观测恢复高频模型：单位根 VAR 的一般位置可识别性AI 解读

The "REtrieval from MIxed Sampling" (REMIS) approach based on blocking developed in Anderson et al. (2016a) is concerned with retrieving an underlying high frequency model from mixed frequency observations. In this paper we investigate parameter-identifiability in the Johansen (1995) vector error correction model for mixed frequency data. We prove that from the second moments of the blocked process after taking differences at lag N (N is the slow sampling rate), the…

高维混合暴露的因果中介路径识别：数据自适应目标参数策略AI 解读

Mediation analysis in causal inference typically concentrates on one binary exposure, using deterministic interventions to split the average treatment effect into direct and indirect effects through a single mediator. Yet, real-world exposure scenarios often involve multiple continuous exposures impacting health outcomes through varied mediation pathways, which remain unknown a priori. Addressing this complexity, we introduce NOVAPathways, a methodological framework that…

含分类工具变量的不可忽略无应答数据：可核查识别条件AI 解读

We consider a model identification problem in which an outcome variable contains nonignorable missing values. Statistical inference requires a guarantee of the model identifiability to obtain estimators enjoying theoretically reasonable properties such as consistency and asymptotic normality. Recently, instrumental or shadow variables, combined with the completeness condition in the outcome model, have been highlighted to make a model identifiable. However, the completeness…

通过反事实推断识别淀粉样蛋白积累与阿尔茨海默病进展的因果关系AI 解读

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is beginning with amyloidosis, followed by neuronal loss and deterioration in structure, function, and cognition. The accumulation of amyloid-beta in the brain, measured through 18F-florbetapir (AV45) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, has been widely used for early diagnosis of AD. However, the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology remains unclear, and causal inference…

利用最优传输量化边际问题中的分布模型风险AI 解读

This paper studies distributional model risk in marginal problems, where each marginal measure is assumed to lie in a Wasserstein ball centered at a fixed reference measure with a given radius. Theoretically, we establish several fundamental results including strong duality, finiteness of the proposed Wasserstein distributional model risk, and the existence of an optimizer at each radius. In addition, we show continuity of the Wasserstein distributional model risk as a…

弱识别函数的强识别泛函推断AI 解读

In a variety of applications, including nonparametric instrumental variable (NPIV) analysis, proximal causal inference under unmeasured confounding, and missing-not-at-random data with shadow variables, we are interested in inference on a continuous linear functional (e.g., average causal effects) of nuisance function (e.g., NPIV regression) defined by conditional moment restrictions. These nuisance functions are generally weakly identified, in that the conditional moment…

极小极大最优的子群识别AI 解读

Quantifying treatment effect heterogeneity is a crucial task in many areas of causal inference, e.g. optimal treatment allocation and estimation of subgroup effects. We study the problem of estimating the level sets of the conditional average treatment effect (CATE), identified under the no-unmeasured-confounders assumption. Given a user-specified threshold, the goal is to estimate the set of all units for whom the treatment effect exceeds that threshold. For example, if the…

用于因果推断的变量重要性匹配AI 解读

Our goal is to produce methods for observational causal inference that are auditable, easy to troubleshoot, accurate for treatment effect estimation, and scalable to high-dimensional data. We describe a general framework called Model-to-Match that achieves these goals by (i) learning a distance metric via outcome modeling, (ii) creating matched groups using the distance metric, and (iii) using the matched groups to estimate treatment effects. Model-to-Match uses variable…

结合外部观测数据识别与估计临床试验长期处理效应AI 解读

In biomedical studies, estimating drug effects on chronic diseases requires a long follow-up period, which is difficult to meet in randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The use of a short-term surrogate to replace the long-term outcome for assessing the drug effect relies on stringent assumptions that empirical studies often fail to satisfy. Motivated by a kidney disease study, we investigate the drug effects on long-term outcomes by combining an RCT without observation of…

近端因果识别算法AI 解读

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental obstacle to establishing valid causal conclusions from observational data. Two complementary types of approaches have been developed to address this obstacle: obtaining identification using fortuitous external aids, such as instrumental variables or proxies, or by means of the ID algorithm, using Markov restrictions on the full data distribution encoded in graphical causal models. In this paper we aim to develop a synthesis of the…

更稳健的聚集与缺口弹性估计AI 解读

This paper studies the bunching identification strategy for an elasticity parameter that summarizes agents' responses to changes in slope (kink) or intercept (notch) of a schedule of incentives. We show that current bunching methods may be very sensitive to implicit assumptions in the literature about unobserved individual heterogeneity. We overcome this sensitivity concern with new non- and semi-parametric estimators. Our estimators allow researchers to show how bunching…

电力需求价格弹性：用工具变量处理高频时间序列的内生性与自相关AI 解读

This paper examines empirical methods for estimating the response of aggregated electricity demand to high-frequency price signals, the short-term elasticity of electricity demand. We investigate how the endogeneity of prices and the autocorrelation of the time series, which are particularly pronounced at hourly granularity, affect and distort common estimators. After developing a controlled test environment with synthetic data that replicate key statistical properties of…

学习条件工具变量表征以估计因果效应AI 解读

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias caused by unmeasured confounders that affect both the treatment and the outcome. The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a powerful way to eliminate the confounding bias from latent confounders. However, the existing IV-based estimators…

RobustIV 与 controlfunctionIV：可能无效工具变量下的因果推断软件AI 解读

We present R software packages RobustIV and controlfunctionIV for causal inference with possibly invalid instrumental variables. RobustIV focuses on the linear outcome model. It implements the two-stage hard thresholding method to select valid instrumental variables from a set of candidate instrumental variables and make inferences for the causal effect in both low- and high-dimensional settings. Furthermore, RobustIV implements the high-dimensional endogeneity test and the…

条件因果效应的可识别性AI 解读

We address the problem of identifiability of an arbitrary conditional causal effect given both the causal graph and a set of any observational and/or interventional distributions of the form $Q[S]:=P(S|do(V\setminus S))$, where $V$ denotes the set of all observed variables and $S\subseteq V$. We call this problem conditional generalized identifiability (c-gID in short) and prove the completeness of Pearl's $do$-calculus for the c-gID problem by providing sound and complete…

BISCUIT：从二元交互中学习因果表征AI 解读

Identifying the causal variables of an environment and how to intervene on them is of core value in applications such as robotics and embodied AI. While an agent can commonly interact with the environment and may implicitly perturb the behavior of some of these causal variables, often the targets it affects remain unknown. In this paper, we show that causal variables can still be identified for many common setups, e.g., additive Gaussian noise models, if the agent's…

离散化时间尺度在连续时间处理因果推断中的作用AI 解读

There are well-established methods for identifying the causal effect of a time-varying treatment applied at discrete time points. However, in the real world, many treatments are continuous or have a finer time scale than the one used for measurement or analysis. While researchers have investigated the discrepancies between estimates under varying discretization scales using simulations and empirical data, it is still unclear how the choice of discretization scale affects…

隐藏混杂下剂量响应的部分识别AI 解读

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding variables -- causal parents of both the treatment and the outcome -- are included as covariates. Unfortunately, given observational data alone, we cannot know with certainty that this criterion is satisfied. Sensitivity analyses provide…

存在部分处理转移者时，基于工具变量估计完整处理效应AI 解读

The effect of the full treatment is a primary parameter of interest in policy evaluation, while often only the effect of a subset of treatment is estimated. We partially identify the local average treatment effect of receiving full treatment (LAFTE) using an instrumental variable that may induce individuals into only a subset of treatment (movers). We show that movers violate the standard exclusion restriction, necessary conditions on the presence of movers are testable, and…

存在空间溢出的双重差分估计AI 解读

Empirical work often uses treatment assigned following geographic boundaries. When the effects of treatment cross over borders, classical difference-in-differences estimation produces biased estimates for the average treatment effect. In this paper, I introduce a potential outcomes framework to model spillover effects and decompose the estimate's bias in two parts: (1) the control group no longer identifies the counterfactual trend because their outcomes are affected by…

因果效应估计的交叉矩方法AI 解读

We consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in linear structural causal models (SCM) with latent confounders when we have access to a single proxy variable. Several methods (such as difference-in-difference (DiD) estimator or negative outcome control) have been proposed in this setting in the literature. However, these approaches require either restrictive assumptions on the data generating model or having access to at least two proxy…