每日简报

广义单调性对平均处理效应的识别能力AI 解读

In the context of a binary outcome, treatment, and instrument, Balke and Pearl (1993, 1997) es- tablish that the monotonicity condition of Imbens and Angrist (1994) has no identifying power beyond instrument exogeneity for average potential outcomes and average treatment effects in the sense that adding it to instrument exogeneity does not decrease the identified sets for those parameters whenever those restrictions are consistent with the distribution of the observable…

存在未知混杂因素时的二元关系处理效应估计AI 解读

This paper proposes estimation and inference methods for assessing treatment effects with dyadic data. Under the assumption that the treatments follow an exchangeable distribution, our approach allows for the presence of any unobserved confounding factors that potentially cause endogeneity of treatment choice without requiring additional information other than the treatments and outcomes. Building on the literature of graphon estimation in network data analysis, we propose a…

将行为实验发现融入动态模型以设计社会变革干预AI 解读

Addressing global challenges often involves stimulating the large-scale adoption of new products or behaviors. Research traditions that focus on individual decision making suggest that achieving this objective requires identifying the drivers of individual discrete adoption choices. On the other hand, computational approaches rooted in complexity science focus on maximizing the propagation of a given product or behavior throughout social networks of interconnected adopters.…

SSRIs 对抑郁症的条目层面异质性治疗效应AI 解读

In analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), Item Response Theory (IRT) models that allow for heterogeneity in the treatment effect at the item level merit consideration. These models for ``item-level heterogeneous treatment effects'' (IL-HTE) can provide more accurate statistical inference, allow researchers to better generalize their results, and resolve critical identification problems in the estimation of interaction…

多重处理下的两阶段最小二乘法AI 解读

We study what two-stage least squares (2SLS) identifies in models with multiple treatments under treatment effect heterogeneity. Two conditions are shown to be necessary and sufficient for the 2SLS to identify positively weighted sums of agent-specific effects of each treatment: average conditional monotonicity and no cross effects. Our identification analysis allows for any number of treatments, any number of continuous or discrete instruments, and the inclusion of…

因果 de Finetti：可交换数据中不变因果结构的识别AI 解读

Constraint-based causal discovery methods leverage conditional independence tests to infer causal relationships in a wide variety of applications. Just as the majority of machine learning methods, existing work focuses on studying $\textit{independent and identically distributed}$ data. However, it is known that even with infinite i.i.d.$\ $ data, constraint-based methods can only identify causal structures up to broad Markov equivalence classes, posing a fundamental…

打开黑箱：基于神经网络的美国衰退实时预测AI 解读

Long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) are used to model US recessions from 1967 to 2021. Their predictive performances are compared to those of the traditional linear models. The out-of-sample performance suggests the application of LSTM and GRU in recession forecasting, especially for longer-term forecasts. The Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) method is applied to both groups of models. The SHAP-based different weight assignments imply the…

最优分类工具变量AI 解读

This paper discusses estimation with a categorical instrumental variable in settings with potentially few observations per category. The proposed categorical instrumental variable estimator (CIV) leverages a regularization assumption that implies existence of a latent categorical variable with fixed finite support achieving the same first stage fit as the observed instrument. In asymptotic regimes that allow the number of observations per category to grow at arbitrary small…

RealTCD：结合大语言模型的干预数据时序因果发现AI 解读

In the field of Artificial Intelligence for Information Technology Operations, causal discovery is pivotal for operation and maintenance of graph construction, facilitating downstream industrial tasks such as root cause analysis. Temporal causal discovery, as an emerging method, aims to identify temporal causal relationships between variables directly from observations by utilizing interventional data. However, existing methods mainly focus on synthetic datasets with heavy…

高维因子模型的拟极大似然估计：批判性综述AI 解读

We review Quasi Maximum Likelihood estimation of factor models for high-dimensional panels of time series. We consider two cases: (1) estimation when no dynamic model for the factors is specified (Bai and Li, 2012, 2016); (2) estimation based on the Kalman smoother and the Expectation Maximization algorithm thus allowing to model explicitly the factor dynamics (Doz et al., 2012, Barigozzi and Luciani, 2019). Our interest is in approximate factor models, i.e., when we allow…

Lasso 筛选后的提升回归与股票收益线性预测AI 解读

We consider a two-stage estimation method for linear regression. First, it uses the lasso in Tibshirani (1996) to screen variables and, second, re-estimates the coefficients using the least-squares boosting method in Friedman (2001) on every set of selected variables. Based on the large-scale simulation experiment in Hastie et al. (2020), lassoed boosting performs as well as the relaxed lasso in Meinshausen (2007) and, under certain scenarios, can yield a sparser model.…

局部条件尾部平均处理效应的估计AI 解读

The conditional tail average treatment effect (CTATE) is defined as a difference between the conditional tail expectations of potential outcomes, which can capture heterogeneity and deliver aggregated local information on treatment effects over different quantile levels and is closely related to the notion of second-order stochastic dominance and the Lorenz curve. These properties render it a valuable tool for policy evaluation. In this paper, we study estimation of the…

利用电子健康记录文本支持因果推断AI 解读

In studies that rely on data from electronic health records (EHRs), unstructured text data such as clinical progress notes offer a rich source of information about patient characteristics and care that may be missing from structured data. Despite the prevalence of text in clinical research, these data are often ignored for the purposes of quantitative analysis due their complexity. This paper presents a unified framework for leveraging text data to support causal inference…

利用协变量与因子模型重建部分观测的函数型数据AI 解读

This paper studies linear reconstruction of partially observed functional data which are recorded on a discrete grid. We propose a novel estimation approach based on approximate factor models with increasing rank taking into account potential covariate information. Whereas alternative reconstruction procedures commonly involve some preliminary smoothing, our method separates the signal from noise and reconstructs missing fragments at once. We establish uniform convergence…

基于全局小波与自助法的协方差平稳性检验AI 解读

We propose a covariance stationarity test for an otherwise dependent and possibly globally non-stationary time series. We work in a generalized version of the new setting in Jin, Wang and Wang (2015), who exploit Walsh (1923) functions in order to compare sub-sample covariances with the full sample counterpart. They impose strict stationarity under the null, only consider linear processes under either hypothesis in order to achieve a parametric estimator for an inverted high…

变分贝叶斯与非贝叶斯更新AI 解读

I show how variational Bayes can be used as a microfoundation for a popular model of non-Bayesian updating.

利用替代结局估计连续处理效应AI 解读

In many real-world causal inference applications, the primary outcomes (labels) are often partially missing, especially if they are expensive or difficult to collect. If the missingness depends on covariates (i.e., missingness is not completely at random), analyses based on fully observed samples alone may be biased. Incorporating surrogates, which are fully observed post-treatment variables related to the primary outcome, can improve estimation in this case. In this paper,…

极端情形下的处理效应AI 解读

Understanding treatment effects in extreme regimes is important for characterizing risks associated with different interventions. This is hindered by the unavailability of counterfactual outcomes and the rarity and difficulty of collecting extreme data in practice. To address this issue, we propose a new framework based on extreme value theory for estimating treatment effects in extreme regimes. We quantify these effects using variations in tail decay rates of potential…

多元极端事件中的因果发现：瑞士河流流量分析AI 解读

Causal asymmetry is based on the principle that an event is a cause only if its absence would not have been a cause. From there, uncovering causal effects becomes a matter of comparing a well-defined score in both directions. Motivated by studying causal effects at extreme levels of a multivariate random vector, we propose to construct a model-agnostic causal score relying solely on the assumption of the existence of a max-domain of attraction. Based on a representation of a…

正常组织并发症概率的边际结构模型AI 解读

The goal of radiation therapy for cancer is to deliver prescribed radiation dose to the tumor while minimizing dose to the surrounding healthy tissues. To evaluate treatment plans, the dose distribution to healthy organs is commonly summarized as dose-volume histograms (DVHs). Normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) modelling has centered around making patient-level risk predictions with features extracted from the DVHs, but few have considered adapting a causal…

鸽巢设计：从在线匹配视角平衡序贯实验AI 解读

Practitioners and academics have long appreciated the benefits of covariate balancing when they conduct randomized experiments. For web-facing firms running online A/B tests, however, it still remains challenging in balancing covariate information when experimental subjects arrive sequentially. In this paper, we study an online experimental design problem, which we refer to as the "Online Blocking Problem." In this problem, experimental subjects with heterogeneous covariate…

预测时间序列中的未来变点AI 解读

Change-point detection and estimation procedures have been widely developed in the literature. However, commonly used approaches in change-point analysis have mainly been focusing on detecting change-points within an entire time series (off-line methods), or quickest detection of change-points in sequentially observed data (on-line methods). Both classes of methods are concerned with change-points that have already occurred. The arguably more important question of when…

大衰退与新冠衰退的实时预测AI 解读

This paper uses standard and penalized logistic regression models to predict the Great Recession and the Covid-19 recession in the US in real time. It examines the predictability of various macroeconomic and financial indicators with respect to the NBER recession indicator. The findings strongly support the use of penalized logistic regression models in recession forecasting. These models, particularly the ridge logistic regression model, outperform the standard logistic…

将试验推断推广到目标总体AI 解读

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are pivotal in generating internally valid estimates with minimal assumptions, serving as a cornerstone for researchers dedicated to advancing causal inference methods. However, extending these findings beyond the experimental cohort to achieve externally valid estimates is crucial for broader scientific inquiry. This paper delves into the forefront of addressing these external validity challenges, encapsulating the essence of a…