每日简报

动态选择下实验与观察数据结合的信息含量AI 解读

This paper addresses the challenge of estimating the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated Survivors (ATETS; Vikstrom et al., 2018) in the absence of long-term experimental data, utilizing available long-term observational data instead. We establish two theoretical results. First, it is impossible to obtain informative bounds for the ATETS with no model restriction and no auxiliary data. Second, to overturn this negative result, we explore as a promising avenue the recent…

用于因果推断的样本经验似然方法AI 解读

Causal inference is crucial for understanding the true impact of interventions, policies, or actions, enabling informed decision-making and providing insights into the underlying mechanisms that shape our world. In this paper, we establish a framework for the estimation and inference of average treatment effects using a two-sample empirical likelihood function. Two different approaches to incorporating propensity scores are developed. The first approach introduces propensity…

始终存活者及其他人群因果效应界限的统一框架AI 解读

We investigate the bounding problem of causal effects in experimental studies in which the outcome is truncated by death, meaning that the subject dies before the outcome can be measured. Causal effects cannot be point identified without instruments and/or tight parametric assumptions but can be bounded under mild restrictions. Previous work on partial identification under the principal stratification framework has primarily focused on the `always-survivor' subpopulation. In…

通过最优传输自动校正异常值AI 解读

In this paper, we propose a novel conceptual framework to detect outliers using optimal transport with a concave cost function. Conventional outlier detection approaches typically use a two-stage procedure: first, outliers are detected and removed, and then estimation is performed on the cleaned data. However, this approach does not inform outlier removal with the estimation task, leaving room for improvement. To address this limitation, we propose an automatic outlier…

未观测混杂下的公平性审计AI 解读

Many definitions of fairness or inequity involve unobservable causal quantities that cannot be directly estimated without strong assumptions. For instance, it is particularly difficult to estimate notions of fairness that rely on hard-to-measure concepts such as risk (e.g., quantifying whether patients at the same risk level have equal probability of treatment, regardless of group membership). Such measurements of risk can be accurately obtained when no unobserved…

密度值函数型面板数据的预测AI 解读

We introduce a statistical method for modeling and forecasting functional panel data represented by multiple densities. Density functions are nonnegative and have a constrained integral and thus do not constitute a linear vector space. We implement a center log-ratio transformation to transform densities into unconstrained functions. These functions exhibit cross-sectional correlation and temporal dependence. Via a functional analysis of variance decomposition, we decompose…

This paper studies debiased machine learning when nuisance parameters appear in indicator functions. An important example is maximized average welfare gain under optimal treatment assignment rules. For asymptotically valid inference for a parameter of interest, the current literature on debiased machine learning relies on Gateaux differentiability of the functions inside moment conditions, which does not hold when nuisance parameters appear in indicator functions. In this…

适用于多种删失机制的生存数据灵活控制函数方法AI 解读

This paper addresses the problem of identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment in the presence of unmeasured confounding and various types of right-censoring. Examples of these censoring mechanisms are administrative censoring, competing risks and dependent censoring (e.g. loss to follow-up). Different parametric transformations are applied to each event time, resulting in a regression model with a more additive structure and error terms that are…

融合 LASSO 与非交叉分位数回归AI 解读

Growth-at-Risk is vital for empirical macroeconomics but is often suspect to quantile crossing due to data limitations. While existing literature addresses this through post-processing of the fitted quantiles, these methods do not correct the estimated coefficients. We advocate for imposing non-crossing constraints during estimation and demonstrate their equivalence to fused LASSO with quantile-specific shrinkage parameters. By re-examining Growth-at-Risk through an…

使用敏感变量建模AI 解读

The paper deals with models in which the dependent variable, some explanatory variables, or both represent sensitive data. We introduce a novel discretization method that preserves data privacy when working with such variables. A multiple discretization method is proposed that utilizes information from the different discretization schemes. We show convergence in distribution for the unobserved variable and derive the asymptotic properties of the OLS estimator for linear…

波动率究竟具有粗糙性还是长记忆？AI 解读

We develop a framework for composite likelihood estimation of parametric continuous-time stationary Gaussian processes. We derive the asymptotic theory of the associated maximum composite likelihood estimator. We implement our approach on a pair of models that have been proposed to describe the random log-spot variance of financial asset returns. A simulation study shows that it delivers good performance in these settings and improves upon a method-of-moments estimation. In…

通胀目标面临的风险：时变参数分布回归AI 解读

Inflation exhibits state-dependent, skewed, and fat-tailed dynamics that make risk a central concern for monetary policy. Accordingly, inflation risks are distributional and cannot be fully captured by mean-based models. We propose a flexible time-varying parameter distributional regression model that estimates the full conditional distribution of inflation, allowing macroeconomic drivers to have nonlinear and asymmetric effects across the distribution. Applied to U.S.…

基于二次型的重随机化统一框架AI 解读

When designing a randomized experiment, one way to ensure treatment and control groups exhibit similar covariate distributions is to randomize treatment until some prespecified level of covariate balance is satisfied; this strategy is known as rerandomization. Most rerandomization methods utilize balance metrics based on a quadratic form $\mathbf{v}^T \mathbf{A} \mathbf{v}$, where $\mathbf{v}$ is a vector of covariate mean differences and $\mathbf{A}$ is a positive…

一般处理类型下稳健匹配观察研究：一致性、效率与适应性AI 解读

To ensure reliable causal conclusions from observational studies, researchers routinely conduct sensitivity analysis to assess robustness to unmeasured confounding. In matched observational studies (one of the most popular observational study designs), two foundational concepts, design sensitivity and Bahadur-Rosenbaum efficiency, are used to quantify the robustness of test statistics and study designs in sensitivity analyses. Unfortunately, these measures of robustness are…

空间随机化设计如何改进政策评估AI 解读

This article studies the benefits of using spatially randomized experimental designs which partition the experimental area into distinct, non-overlapping units with treatments assigned randomly. Such designs offer improved policy evaluation in online experiments by providing more precise policy value estimators and more effective A/B testing algorithms than traditional global designs, which apply the same treatment across all units simultaneously. We examine both parametric…

类别数据的稳健估计与推断AI 解读

Categorical data pose a distinctive robustness challenge: contingency-table cells need not have a meaningful magnitude, ordering, or metric, so departures must instead be assessed through discrepancies between observed cell frequencies and model-implied probabilities. We develop $C$-estimation, a unifying framework for robust estimation in structured categorical models. $C$-estimation limits the influence of large frequency discrepancies and can be applied to unconditional,…

机器学习预测不确定性估计综述AI 解读

Predictions and forecasts of machine learning models should take the form of probability distributions, aiming to increase the quantity of information communicated to end users. Although applications of probabilistic prediction and forecasting with machine learning models in academia and industry are becoming more frequent, related concepts and methods have not been formalized and structured under a holistic view of the entire field. Here, we review the topic of predictive…

两样本汇总数据孟德尔随机化中的修正去偏逆方差加权估计AI 解读

Mendelian randomization uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to make causal inferences about the effects of modifiable risk factors on diseases from observational data. One of the major challenges in Mendelian randomization is that many genetic variants are only modestly or even weakly associated with the risk factor of interest, a setting known as many weak instruments. Many existing methods, such as the popular inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method, could be…

带协变量的实体排序：极大似然估计的不确定性量化AI 解读

This paper concerns with statistical estimation and inference for the ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons with additional covariate information such as the attributes of the compared items. Despite extensive studies, few prior literatures investigate this problem under the more realistic setting where covariate information exists. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel model, Covariate-Assisted Ranking Estimation (CARE) model, that extends the well-known…

识别与统计决策理论AI 解读

Econometricians have usefully separated study of estimation into identification and statistical components. Identification analysis, which assumes knowledge of the probability distribution generating observable data, places an upper bound on what may be learned about population parameters of interest with finite sample data. Yet Wald's statistical decision theory studies decision making with sample data without reference to identification, indeed without reference to…

面向高维数据的高效张量回归AI 解读

Most currently used tensor regression models for high-dimensional data are based on Tucker decomposition, which has good properties but loses its efficiency in compressing tensors very quickly as the order of tensors increases, say greater than four or five. However, for the simplest tensor autoregression in handling time series data, its coefficient tensor already has the order of six. This paper revises a newly proposed tensor train (TT) decomposition and then applies it…

经济固定事件预测的预测区间AI 解读

The fixed-event forecasting setup is common in economic policy. It involves a sequence of forecasts of the same (`fixed') predictand, so that the difficulty of the forecasting problem decreases over time. Fixed-event point forecasts are typically published without a quantitative measure of uncertainty. To construct such a measure, we consider forecast postprocessing techniques tailored to the fixed-event case. We develop regression methods that impose constraints motivated…

Forster–Warmuth 反事实回归：统一学习方法AI 解读

Series or orthogonal basis regression is one of the most popular non-parametric regression techniques in practice, obtained by regressing the response on features generated by evaluating the basis functions at observed covariate values. The most routinely used series estimator is based on ordinary least squares fitting, which is known to be minimax rate optimal in various settings, albeit under stringent restrictions on the basis functions and the distribution of covariates.…

可穿戴设备、传感器与分布型数据的可解释因果推断AI 解读

Many modern causal questions ask how treatments affect complex outcomes that are measured using wearable devices and sensors. Current analysis approaches require summarizing these data into scalar statistics (e.g., the mean), but these summaries can be misleading. For example, disparate distributions can have the same means, variances, and other statistics. Researchers can overcome the loss of information by instead representing the data as distributions. We develop an…