每日简报

因果 SHAP：通过因果发现实现依赖关系感知的特征归因AI 解读

Explaining machine learning (ML) predictions has become crucial as ML models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. While SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is widely used for model interpretability, it fails to differentiate between causality and correlation, often misattributing feature importance when features are highly correlated. We propose Causal SHAP, a novel framework that integrates causal relationships into feature attribution while…

用于个性化与透明证据综合的加权方法AI 解读

Over the past few decades, statistical methods for causal inference have made impressive strides, enabling progress across a range of scientific fields. However, much of this methodological development has been confined to individual studies, limiting its ability to draw more generalizable conclusions. Achieving a thorough understanding of cause and effect typically relies on the integration, reconciliation, and synthesis from diverse study designs and multiple data sources.…

何时可以进行因果推断？未测量混杂的统计检验AI 解读

This paper clarifies a fundamental difference between causal inference and traditional statistical inference by formalizing a mathematical distinction between their respective parameters. We connect two major approaches to causal inference, the potential outcomes framework and causal structure graphs, which are typically studied separately. While the unconfoundedness assumption in the potential outcomes framework cannot be assessed from an observational dataset alone, causal…

边际上的处理效应：每个人都处于边际AI 解读

This paper develops a framework for identifying treatment effects when a policy simultaneously alters both the incentive to participate and the outcome of interest -- such as hiring decisions and wages in response to employment subsidies; or working decisions and wages in response to job trainings. This framework was inspired by my PhD project on a Belgian reform that subsidised first-time hiring, inducing entry by marginal firms yet meanwhile changing the wages they pay.…

具有信息性处理时点的因果效应估计AI 解读

Epidemiological studies are often concerned with estimating causal effects of a sequence of treatment decisions on survival outcomes. In many settings, treatment decisions do not occur at fixed, pre-specified followup times. Rather, timing varies across subjects in ways that may be informative of subsequent treatment decisions and potential outcomes. Awareness of the issue and its potential solutions is lacking in the literature, which motivate this work. Here, we formalize…

优化随机临床试验处理分配的自适应设计AI 解读

The treatment assignment mechanism in a randomized clinical trial can be optimized for statistical efficiency within a specified class of randomization mechanisms. Optimal designs of this type have been characterized in terms of the variances of potential outcomes conditional on baseline covariates. Approximating these optimal designs requires information about the conditional variance functions, which is often unavailable or unreliable at the design stage. As a practical…

ProCause：生成反事实结果以评估处方式流程监控方法AI 解读

Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PresPM) is the subfield of Process Mining that focuses on optimizing processes through real-time interventions based on event log data. Evaluating PresPM methods is challenging due to the lack of ground-truth outcomes for all intervention actions in datasets. A generative deep learning approach from the field of Causal Inference (CI), RealCause, has been commonly used to estimate the outcomes for proposed intervention actions to evaluate a…

面板 AR(1) 模型中基于准极大似然的一致有效推断AI 解读

Maximum Likelihood (ML) offers attractive alternatives to Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators for dynamic panel data models. However, to date no identification-robust inference methods exist that can be used in conjunction with the ML estimators for these models. In this paper we propose ML based inference methods for panel AR(1) models with arbitrary initial conditions and heteroskedasticity that are robust to the strength of identification. We show that (Quasi)…

固定效应与任意初始条件下的面板 AR(1) 修正极大似然估计再研究AI 解读

In this paper we consider two generalizations of Lancaster's (Review of Economic Studies, 2002) Modified Maximum Likelihood estimator (MMLE) for the panel AR(1) model with fixed effects, arbitrary initial conditions, and strictly exogenous covariates when the time dimension of the panel, T, is fixed. When the autoregressive parameter rho=1, the limiting modified profile log-likelihood function for this model has a stationary point of inflection, and rho is first-order…

利用汇总因果图与忠实分布确定时间序列因果关系方向AI 解读

Understanding causal relations between temporal variables is a central challenge in time series analysis, particularly when the full causal structure is unknown. Even when the full causal structure cannot be fully specified, experts often succeed in providing a high-level abstraction of the causal graph, known as a summary causal graph, which captures the main causal relations between different time series while abstracting away micro-level details. In this work, we present…

随机临床试验中有序结果胜出统计量的协变量调整AI 解读

Ordinal outcomes are common in clinical settings where they often represent increasing levels of disease progression or different levels of functional impairment. In this article, we focus on representing the average treatment effect for ordinal outcomes via intrinsic pairwise outcome comparisons captured through win estimands, such as the win ratio and win difference. Recognizing the value of baseline covariate adjustment toward enhanced precision, we first develop…

基于匹配的组平均处理效应非参数估计AI 解读

Heterogeneous treatment effects, which vary according to individual covariates, are crucial in fields such as personalized medicine and tailored treatment strategies. In many applications, rather than considering the heterogeneity induced by all covariates, practitioners focus on a few key covariates to develop tailored treatment decisions. Based on this, we aim to estimate the group average treatment effects (GATEs), which represent heterogeneous treatment effects across…

结局误分类与非随机验证子集下整群随机试验的平均处理效应估计AI 解读

Randomized trials are viewed as the benchmark for assessing causal effects of treatments on outcomes of interest. Nonetheless, challenges such as measurement error can undermine the standard causal assumptions for randomized trials. In ASPIRE, a cluster-randomized trial, pediatric primary care clinics were assigned to one of two treatments aimed at promoting clinician delivery of a secure firearm program to parents during well-child visits. A key outcome of interest is thus…

可分离辅助参数下部分识别参数的两阶段推断AI 解读

This paper develops a two-stage method for inference on partially identified parameters in moment inequality models with separable nuisance parameters. In the first stage, the nuisance parameters are estimated separately, and in the second stage, the identified set for the parameters of interest is constructed using a refined chi-squared test with variance correction that accounts for the first-stage estimation error. We establish the asymptotic validity of the proposed…

利用高维经验似然进行平均处理效应的多重稳健推断AI 解读

In this paper, we develop a multiply robust inference procedure of the average treatment effect (ATE) for data with high-dimensional covariates. We consider the case where it is difficult to correctly specify a single parametric model for the propensity scores (PS). For example, the target population is formed from heterogeneous sources with different treatment assignment mechanisms. We propose a novel high-dimensional empirical likelihood weighting method under soft…

从加权视角理解空间回归：超级基金场地修复的观察性研究AI 解读

A key challenge in environmental health research is unmeasured spatial confounding, driven by unobserved spatially structured variables that influence both treatment and outcome. A common approach is to fit a spatial regression that models the outcome as a linear function of treatment and covariates, with a spatially structured error term to account for unmeasured spatial confounding. However, it remains unclear to what extent spatial regression actually accounts for such…

部分函数型动态后门扩散因果模型AI 解读

Causal inference in spatio-temporal settings is critically hindered by unmeasured confounders with complex spatio-temporal dynamics and the prevalence of multi-resolution data. While diffusion models present a promising avenue for estimating structural causal models, existing approaches are limited by assumptions of causal sufficiency or static confounding, failing to capture the region-specific, temporally dependent nature of real-world latent variables or to directly…

三重稳健面板估计量AI 解读

This paper studies estimation of causal effects in a panel data setting. We introduce a new estimator, the Triply RObust Panel (TROP) estimator, that combines (i) a flexible model for the potential outcomes based on a low-rank factor structure on top of a two-way-fixed effect specification, with (ii) unit weights intended to upweight units similar to the treated units and (iii) time weights intended to upweight time periods close to the treated time periods. We study the…

高维混杂下的因果机器学习方法与交叉拟合AI 解读

Observational epidemiological studies commonly seek to estimate the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome. Adjustment for potential confounding bias in modern studies is challenging due to the presence of high-dimensional confounding, which occurs when there are many confounders relative to sample size or complex relationships between continuous confounders and exposure and outcome. Doubly robust methods such as Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting (AIPW) and…

回归不连续设计中的异质性处理效应发现AI 解读

The paper proposes a causal supervised machine learning algorithm to uncover treatment effect heterogeneity in sharp and fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) designs. We develop a criterion for building an honest ``regression discontinuity tree'', where each leaf contains the RD estimate of a treatment conditional on the values of some pre-treatment covariates. It is a priori unknown which covariates are relevant for capturing treatment effect heterogeneity, and it is the…

未知干扰结构下纵向数据的因果推断AI 解读

In longitudinal studies where units are embedded in space or a social network, interference may arise, meaning that a unit's outcome can depend on treatment histories of others. The presence of interference poses significant challenges for causal inference, particularly when the interference structure -- how a unit's outcome responds to others' influences -- is complex, heterogeneous, and unknown to researchers. This paper develops a general framework for identifying and…

基于 HAL 的因果剂量反应曲线插件估计与逐点渐近正态性AI 解读

Estimating and obtaining reliable inference for the marginally adjusted causal dose-response curve for continuous treatments without relying on parametric assumptions is a well-known statistical challenge. Parametric models risk introducing significant bias through model misspecification, compromising the accurate representation of the underlying data and dose-response relationship. On the other hand, nonparametric models face difficulties as the dose-response curve is not…

检查引导随机化：灵活透明的受限随机化实验设计框架AI 解读

Randomized experiments are considered the gold standard for estimating causal effects. However, out of the set of possible randomized assignments, some may be likely to produce poor effect estimates and misleading conclusions. Restricted randomization is an experimental design strategy that filters out undesirable treatment assignments, but its application has primarily been limited to ensuring covariate balance in two-arm studies where the target estimand is the average…

具有马尔可夫结构的面板数据混合逻辑回归模型AI 解读

In this study, we propose a mixture logistic regression model with a Markov structure, and consider the estimation of model parameters using maximum likelihood estimation. We also provide a forward type variable selection algorithm to choose the important explanatory variables to reduce the number of parameters in the proposed model.