每日简报

用变点方法刻画非平稳土壤水分动态AI 解读

Soil moisture dynamics provide an indicator of soil health that scientists model via drydown curves. The typical modelling process requires the soil moisture time series to be manually separated into drydown segments and then exponential decay models are fitted to them independently. Sensor development over recent years means that experiments that were previously conducted over a few field campaigns can now be scaled to months or years at a higher sampling rate. To better…

对密度比估计误差稳健的双重去偏协变量漂移适应AI 解读

Consider a scenario where we have access to train data with both covariates and outcomes while test data only contains covariates. In this scenario, our primary aim is to predict the missing outcomes of the test data. With this objective in mind, we train parametric regression models under a covariate shift, where covariate distributions are different between the train and test data. For this problem, existing studies have proposed covariate shift adaptation via importance…

从时间序列因果图的抽象表示识别总效应AI 解读

We study the problem of identifiability of the total effect of an intervention from observational time series in the situation, common in practice, where one only has access to abstractions of the true causal graph. We consider here two abstractions: the extended summary causal graph, which conflates all lagged causal relations but distinguishes between lagged and instantaneous relations, and the summary causal graph which does not give any indication about the lag between…

用于条件平均处理效应模型选择的因果 Q 聚合AI 解读

Accurate estimation of conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is at the core of personalized decision making. While there is a plethora of models for CATE estimation, model selection is a nontrivial task, due to the fundamental problem of causal inference. Recent empirical work provides evidence in favor of proxy loss metrics with double robust properties and in favor of model ensembling. However, theoretical understanding is lacking. Direct application of prior…

结果缺失下的设计型因果推断：缺失机制、插补随机化检验与协变量调整AI 解读

Design-based causal inference, also known as randomization-based or finite-population causal inference, is one of the most widely used causal inference frameworks, largely due to the merit that its validity can be guaranteed by study design (e.g., randomized experiments) and does not require assuming specific outcome-generating distributions or super-population models. Despite its advantages, design-based causal inference can still suffer from other issues, among which…

比例风险模型中的倾向加权加回归调整不具一般双重稳健性AI 解读

Recently, it has become common for applied works to combine commonly used survival analysis modeling methods, such as the multivariable Cox model and propensity score weighting, with the intention of forming a doubly robust estimator of an exposure effect hazard ratio that is unbiased in large samples when either the Cox model or the propensity score model is correctly specified. This combination does not, in general, produce a doubly robust estimator, even after regression…

协变量平衡与平均处理效应加权、双重稳健估计量的等价性AI 解读

How should researchers adjust for covariates? We show that if the propensity score is estimated using a specific covariate balancing approach, inverse probability weighting (IPW), augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW), and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) estimators are numerically equivalent for the average treatment effect (ATE), and likewise for the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). The resulting weights are inherently…

存在跨簇干扰的整群随机试验AI 解读

The literature on cluster-randomized trials typically allows for interference within but not across clusters. This may be implausible when units are irregularly distributed across space without well-separated communities, as clusters in such cases may not align with significant geographic, social, or economic divisions. This paper develops methods for reducing bias due to cross-cluster interference. We first propose an estimation strategy that excludes units not surrounded…

通过摊销条件独立检验实现可扩展因果结构学习AI 解读

Controlling false positives (Type I errors) through statistical hypothesis testing is a foundation of modern scientific data analysis. Existing causal structure discovery algorithms either do not provide Type I error control or cannot scale to the size of modern scientific datasets. We consider a variant of the causal discovery problem with two sets of nodes, where the only edges of interest form a bipartite causal subgraph between the sets. We develop Scalable Causal…

利用数据改进稳健决策AI 解读

A decision-maker faces uncertainty governed by a data-generating process (DGP), which is only known to belong to a set of sequences of independent but possibly non-identical distributions. A robust decision maximizes the expected payoff against the worst possible DGP in this set. This paper characterizes when and how such robust decisions can be \emph{objectively} improved with data -- that is, yield higher expected payoffs under the true DGP regardless of which DGP is the…

横截面与时间联合概率预测协调：方法与实践问题AI 解读

Forecast reconciliation is a post-forecasting process that involves transforming a set of incoherent forecasts into coherent forecasts which satisfy a given set of linear constraints for a multivariate time series. In this paper we extend the current state-of-the-art cross-sectional probabilistic forecast reconciliation approach to encompass a cross-temporal framework, where temporal constraints are also applied. Our proposed methodology employs both parametric Gaussian and…

Fisher–Schultz 讲座：随机实验中异质性处理效应的通用机器学习推断及印度免疫接种应用AI 解读

We propose strategies to estimate and make inference on key features of heterogeneous effects in randomized experiments. These key features include best linear predictors of the effects using machine learning proxies, average effects sorted by impact groups, and average characteristics of most and least impacted units. The approach is valid in high dimensional settings, where the effects are proxied (but not necessarily consistently estimated) by predictive and causal…

不依从与未知干扰下的因果推断AI 解读

We consider a causal inference model in which individuals interact in a social network and they may not comply with the assigned treatments. In particular, we suppose that the form of network interference is unknown to researchers. To estimate meaningful causal parameters in this situation, we introduce a new concept of exposure mapping, which summarizes potentially complicated spillover effects into a fixed dimensional statistic of instrumental variables. We investigate…

利用GWAS汇总数据推断非线性因果效应AI 解读

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have offered an exciting opportunity to discover putative causal genes or risk factors associated with diseases by using SNPs as instrumental variables (IVs). However, conventional approaches assume linear causal relations partly for simplicity and partly for the availability of GWAS summary data. In this work, we propose a novel model {for transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS)} to incorporate nonlinear relationships…

现代 Gauss–Markov 定理？果真如此？AI 解读

We show that the theorems in Hansen (2021a) (the version accepted by Econometrica), except for one, are not new as they coincide with classical theorems like the good old Gauss-Markov or Aitken Theorem, respectively; the exceptional theorem is incorrect. Hansen (2021b) corrects this theorem. As a result, all theorems in the latter version coincide with the above mentioned classical theorems. Furthermore, we also show that the theorems in Hansen (2022) (the version published…

近端因果学习的最优处理规则AI 解读

A common concern when a policymaker draws causal inferences from and makes decisions based on observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding, i.e., the standard no confoundedness assumption fails to hold. The recently proposed proximal causal inference framework shows that proxy variables that abound in real-life scenarios can be leveraged to identify causal effects and therefore facilitate…

含生成回归变量的半参数模型自助法设定检验AI 解读

This paper provides a specification test for semiparametric models with nonparametrically generated regressors. Such variables are not observed by the researcher but are nonparametrically identified and estimable. Applications of the test include models with endogenous regressors identified by control functions, semiparametric sample selection models, or binary games with incomplete information. The statistic is built from the residuals of the semiparametric model. A novel…

不确定因果网络中的因果效应识别AI 解读

Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature, where complete algorithms have been proposed to identify causal queries of interest. The validity of these algorithms hinges on the restrictive assumption of having access to a correctly specified causal structure. In this work, we study the setting where a probabilistic model of the causal structure is available. Specifically, the edges in a causal graph exist with uncertainties which may, for example,…

超大样本半参数单调指数模型的随机学习AI 解读

I study the estimation of semiparametric monotone index models in the scenario where the number of observation points $n$ is extremely large and conventional approaches fail to work due to heavy computational burdens. Motivated by the mini-batch gradient descent algorithm (MBGD) that is widely used as a stochastic optimization tool in the machine learning field, I proposes a novel subsample- and iteration-based estimation procedure. In particular, starting from any initial…

高维潜在高斯计数时间序列：自协方差集中界及应用AI 解读

This work considers stationary vector count time series models defined via deterministic functions of a latent stationary vector Gaussian series. The construction is very general and ensures a pre-specified marginal distribution for the counts in each dimension, depending on unknown parameters that can be marginally estimated. The vector Gaussian series injects flexibility into the model's temporal and cross-dimensional dependencies, perhaps through a parametric model akin…

因果模型的参数化与模拟AI 解读

Many statistical problems in causal inference involve a probability distribution other than the one from which data are actually observed; as an additional complication, the object of interest is often a marginal quantity of this other probability distribution. This creates many practical complications for statistical inference, even where the problem is non-parametrically identified. In particular, it is difficult to perform likelihood-based inference, or even to simulate…

无需对工具变量平滑的部分线性工具变量回归AI 解读

We consider a semiparametric partly linear model identified by instrumental variables. We propose an estimation method that does not smooth on the instruments and we extend the Landweber-Fridman regularization scheme to the estimation of this semiparametric model. We then show the asymptotic normality of the parametric estimator and obtain the convergence rate for the nonparametric estimator. Our estimator that does not smooth on the instruments coincides with a typical…

使用 PNAR R 包进行网络计数时间序列推断AI 解读

We introduce a new R package useful for inference about network count time series. Such data are frequently encountered in statistics and they are usually treated as multivariate time series. Their statistical analysis is based on linear or log linear models. Nonlinear models, which have been applied successfully in several research areas, have been neglected from such applications mainly because of their computational complexity. We provide R users the flexibility to fit…

非参数回归的涵盖检验AI 解读

We set up a formal framework to characterize encompassing of nonparametric models through the L2 distance. We contrast it to previous literature on the comparison of nonparametric regression models. We then develop testing procedures for the encompassing hypothesis that are fully nonparametric. Our test statistics depend on kernel regression, raising the issue of bandwidth's choice. We investigate two alternative approaches to obtain a "small bias property" for our test…