每日简报

多变量连续处理的效应异质性与重要性度量AI 解读

Estimating the joint effect of a multivariate, continuous exposure is crucial, particularly in environmental health where interest lies in simultaneously evaluating the impact of multiple environmental pollutants on health. We develop novel methodology that addresses two key issues for estimation of treatment effects of multivariate, continuous exposures. We use nonparametric Bayesian methodology that is flexible to ensure our approach can capture a wide range of data…

具有多个异质结局的基因组数据因果推断AI 解读

With the evolution of single-cell RNA sequencing techniques into a standard approach in genomics, it has become possible to conduct cohort-level causal inferences based on single-cell-level measurements. However, the individual gene expression levels of interest are not directly observable; instead, only repeated proxy measurements from each individual's cells are available, providing a derived outcome to estimate the underlying outcome for each of many genes. In this paper,…

存在溢出效应的断点回归设计AI 解读

This paper studies regression discontinuity designs (RDD) when linear-in-means spillovers occur between units that are close in their running variable. We show that the RDD estimand depends on the ratio of two terms: (1) the radius over which spillovers occur and (2) the choice of bandwidth used for the local linear regression. RDD estimates direct treatment effect when radius is of larger order than the bandwidth and total treatment effect when radius is of smaller order…

贝叶斯惩罚变换模型：面向任意条件分布的结构化可加位置—尺度回归AI 解读

Penalized transformation models (PTMs) are a semiparametric location-scale regression family that estimate a response's conditional distribution directly from the data, and model the location and scale through structured additive predictors. The core of the model is a monotonically increasing transformation function that relates the response distribution to a reference distribution. The transformation function is equipped with a smoothness prior that regularizes how much the…

基于主序关系的加性噪声模型广义可识别性准则AI 解读

The discovery of causal relationships from observational data is very challenging. Many recent approaches rely on complexity or uncertainty concepts to impose constraints on probability distributions, aiming to identify specific classes of directed acyclic graph (DAG) models. In this paper, we introduce a novel identifiability criterion for DAGs that places constraints on the conditional variances of additive noise models. We demonstrate that this criterion extends and…

通过原因的后验效应评估连续结果的成因AI 解读

To evaluate a single cause of a binary effect, Dawid et al. (2014) defined the probability of causation, while Pearl (2015) defined the probabilities of necessity and sufficiency. For assessing the multiple correlated causes of a binary effect, Lu et al. (2023) defined the posterior causal effects based on post-treatment variables. In many scenarios, outcomes are continuous, simply binarizing them and applying previous methods may result in information loss or biased…

聚类网络观察研究中用于因果推断的联合混合效应模型AI 解读

Causal inference on populations embedded in social networks poses technical challenges, since the typical no interference assumption frequently does not hold. Existing methods developed in the context of network interference rely upon the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. However, when faced with multilevel network data, there may be a latent factor influencing both the exposure and the outcome at the cluster level. We propose a Bayesian inference approach that…

多区域临床试验中基于限制平均生存时间的处理效应及区域修饰因素推断AI 解读

Multi-regional clinical trials (MRCTs) play an increasingly crucial role in global pharmaceutical development by expediting data gathering and regulatory approval across diverse patient populations. However, differences in recruitment practices and regional demographics often lead to variations in study participant characteristics, potentially biasing treatment effect estimates and undermining treatment effect consistency assessment across regions. To address this challenge,…

结合深度学习的极端分位数回归AI 解读

Estimation of extreme conditional quantiles is often required for risk assessment of natural hazards in climate and geo-environmental sciences and for quantitative risk management in statistical finance, econometrics, and actuarial sciences. Interest often lies in extrapolating to quantile levels that exceed any past observations. Therefore, it is crucial to use a statistical framework that is well-adapted and especially designed for this purpose, and here extreme-value…

系统性选择下数据融合问题的一般识别算法AI 解读

Causal inference is made challenging by confounding, selection bias, and other complications. A common approach to addressing these difficulties is the inclusion of auxiliary data on the superpopulation of interest. Such data may measure a different set of variables, or be obtained under different experimental conditions than the primary dataset. Analysis based on multiple datasets must carefully account for similarities between datasets, while appropriately accounting for…

多重稳健的因果变化归因AI 解读

Comparing two samples of data, we observe a change in the distribution of an outcome variable. In the presence of multiple explanatory variables, how much of the change can be explained by each possible cause? We develop a new estimation strategy that, given a causal model, combines regression and re-weighting methods to quantify the contribution of each causal mechanism. Our proposed methodology is multiply robust, meaning that it still recovers the target parameter under…

三维面板数据模型的估计与推断AI 解读

Hierarchical panel data models have recently garnered significant attention. This study contributes to the relevant literature by introducing a novel three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical panel data model, which integrates panel regression with three sets of latent factor structures: one set of global factors and two sets of local factors. Instead of aggregating latent factors from various nodes, as seen in the literature of distributed principal component analysis (PCA), we…

形状约束函数型时间序列的状态空间建模AI 解读

Functional time series data frequently appears in econometric analyses, where the functions of interest are subject to some shape constraints, including monotonicity and convexity, as typical of the estimation of the Lorenz curve. This paper proposes a state-space model for time-varying functions to extract trends and serial dependence from functional time series while imposing the shape constraints on the estimated functions. The function of interest is modeled by a convex…

经中介路径传导的因果归因概率AI 解读

We propose a set of causal estimands that we call the "mediated probabilities of causation." These estimands quantify the probabilities that an observed negative outcome was induced via a mediating pathway versus a direct pathway in a stylized setting involving a binary exposure or intervention, a single binary mediator, and a binary outcome. We outline a set of conditions sufficient to identify these effects given observed data, and propose a doubly-robust projection based…

折点聚集下的因果推断AI 解读

Kinked policies change marginal incentives at a threshold, and agents respond by adjusting the assignment variable that determines their treatment. The bunching literature uses this response to estimate the elasticity of the assignment variable; policymakers often care about effects on other outcomes. We develop a framework for estimating causal effects of kinked policies on outcomes beyond the assignment variable when agents can fully manipulate it. Average effects are…

簇规模不可忽略时簇随机实验的统计推断AI 解读

This paper considers the problem of inference in cluster randomized experiments when cluster sizes are non-ignorable. Here, by a cluster randomized experiment, we mean one in which treatment is assigned at the cluster level. By non-ignorable cluster sizes, we refer to the possibility that the treatment effects may depend non-trivially on the cluster sizes. We frame our analysis in a super-population framework in which cluster sizes are random. In this way, our analysis…

用于估计因果效应的局部因果发现AI 解读

Even when the causal graph underlying our data is unknown, we can use observational data to narrow down the possible values that an average treatment effect (ATE) can take by (1) identifying the graph up to a Markov equivalence class; and (2) estimating that ATE for each graph in the class. While the PC algorithm can identify this class under strong faithfulness assumptions, it can be computationally prohibitive. Fortunately, only the local graph structure around the…

最优加权平均导数效应AI 解读

Weighted average derivative effects (WADEs) are nonparametric estimands with uses in economics and causal inference. Debiased WADE estimators typically require learning the conditional mean outcome as well as a Riesz representer (RR) that characterises the requisite debiasing corrections. RR estimators for WADEs often rely on kernel estimators, introducing complicated bandwidth-dependant biases. In our work we propose a new class of RRs that are isomorphic to the class of…

CAVIAR：用于准确与稳健推断的类别变量嵌入AI 解读

Social science research often hinges on the relationship between categorical variables and outcomes. We introduce CAVIAR, a novel method for embedding categorical variables that assume values in a high-dimensional ambient space but are sampled from an underlying manifold. Our theoretical and numerical analyses outline challenges posed by such categorical variables in causal inference. Specifically, dynamically varying and sparse levels can lead to violations of the Donsker…

可逆潜在因果模型中领域反事实的刻画AI 解读

Answering counterfactual queries has important applications such as explainability, robustness, and fairness but is challenging when the causal variables are unobserved and the observations are non-linear mixtures of these latent variables, such as pixels in images. One approach is to recover the latent Structural Causal Model (SCM), which may be infeasible in practice due to requiring strong assumptions, e.g., linearity of the causal mechanisms or perfect atomic…

动态有序面板 Logit 模型AI 解读

This paper studies a dynamic ordered logit model for panel data with fixed effects. The main contribution of the paper is to construct a set of valid moment conditions that are free of the fixed effects. The moment functions can be computed using four or more periods of data, and the paper presents sufficient conditions for the moment conditions to identify the common parameters of the model, namely the regression coefficients, the autoregressive parameters, and the…