每日简报

加权平均处理效应的速率双重稳健估计AI 解读

The weighted average treatment effect (WATE) defines a versatile class of causal estimands for populations characterized by propensity score weights, including the average treatment effect (ATE), treatment effect on the treated (ATT), on controls (ATC), and for the overlap population (ATO). WATE has broad applicability in social and medical research, as many datasets from these fields align with its framework. However, the literature lacks a systematic investigation into the…

兼顾公平性与可解释性的政策学习AI 解读

Fairness and interpretability play an important role in the adoption of decision-making algorithms across many application domains. These requirements are intended to avoid undesirable group differences and to alleviate concerns related to transparency. This paper proposes a framework that integrates fairness and interpretability into algorithmic decision making by combining data transformation with policy trees, a class of interpretable policy functions. The approach is…

存在干扰时利用工具变量估计政策相关因果效应AI 解读

Many policy evaluations using instrumental variable (IV) methods include individuals who interact with each other, potentially violating the standard IV assumptions. This paper defines and partially identifies direct and spillover effects with a clear policy-relevant interpretation under relatively mild assumptions on interference. Our framework accommodates both spillovers from the instrument to treatment and from treatment to outcomes and allows for multiple peers. By…

无混杂与重叠性同时失效时基于增广百分位自助法的稳健敏感性分析AI 解读

The identification of causal effects in observational studies typically relies on two standard assumptions: unconfoundedness and overlap. However, both assumptions are often questionable in practice: unconfoundedness is inherently untestable, and overlap may fail in the presence of extreme unmeasured confounding. While various approaches have been developed to address unmeasured confounding and extreme propensity scores separately, few methods accommodate simultaneous…

事件研究中的时变异质性处理效应AI 解读

This paper examines the identification and estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects in event studies, emphasizing the importance of both lagged dependent variables and treatment effect heterogeneity. We show that omitting lagged dependent variables can induce omitted variable bias in the estimated time-varying treatment effects. We develop a novel semiparametric approach based on a short-T dynamic linear panel model with correlated random coefficients, where the…

面板数据的超阈值峰值建模：两层分组广义帕累托回归AI 解读

Panel data arise in a wide range of application areas, and developing modelling methods for extreme values under such a setup is essential for reliable risk assessment and management. When choosing to model the marginal distributions of univariate extremes, one may wish to balance the flexibility in capturing the heterogeneity among margins and the efficiency of estimation. This can be achieved through a combination of regression techniques and assuming a latent group…

非可分三角模型中个体处理效应分布的推断AI 解读

In this paper, we develop inference methods for the distribution of heterogeneous individual treatment effects (ITEs) in the nonseparable triangular model with a binary endogenous treatment and a binary instrument of Vuong and Xu (2017) and Feng, Vuong, and Xu (2019). We focus on the estimation of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the ITE, which can be used to address a wide range of practically important questions such as inference on the proportion of…

什么是概率测度的良好匹配？传输映射的反事实视角AI 解读

Coupling probability measures lies at the core of many problems in statistics and machine learning, from domain adaptation to transfer learning and causal inference. Yet, even when restricted to deterministic transports, such couplings are not identifiable: two atomless marginals admit infinitely many transport maps. The common recourse to optimal transport, motivated by cost minimization and cyclical monotonicity, obscures the fact that several distinct notions of…

利用企业调查、最大熵与带状多面体估计产业异质性AI 解读

This study introduces a novel framework for estimating industrial heterogeneity by integrating maximum entropy (ME) estimation of production functions with Zonotope-based measures. Traditional production function estimations often rely on restrictive parametric models, failing to capture firm behavior under uncertainty. This research addresses these limitations by applying Hang K. Ryu's ME method to estimate production functions using World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data…

大量弱无效工具变量下右删失结局的半参数因果推断AI 解读

We propose a semiparametric framework for causal inference with right-censored survival outcomes and many weak invalid instruments, motivated by Mendelian randomization in biobank studies where classical methods may fail. We adopt an accelerated failure time model and construct a moment condition based on augmented inverse probability of censoring weighting, incorporating both uncensored and censored observations. Under a heteroscedasticity-based condition on the treatment…

孟德尔随机化因果推断方法：估计对象、识别与推断AI 解读

Mendelian randomization (MR) has become an essential tool for causal inference in biomedical and public health research. By using genetic variants as instrumental variables, MR helps address unmeasured confounding and reverse causation, offering a quasi-experimental framework to evaluate causal effects of modifiable exposures on health outcomes. Despite its promise, MR faces substantial methodological challenges, including invalid instruments, weak instrument bias, and…

高效且易用的离散选择实验：R 包 DCEtoolAI 解读

Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) are widely used to elicit preferences for products or services by analyzing choices among alternatives described by their attributes. The quality of the insights obtained from a DCE heavily depends on the properties of its experimental design. While early DCEs often relied on linear criteria such as orthogonality, these approaches were later found to be inappropriate for discrete choice models, which are inherently non-linear. As a result,…

等误差方差结构方程模型的一致贝叶斯因果发现AI 解读

We consider the problem of recovering the true causal structure among a set of variables, generated by a linear acyclic structural equation model (SEM) with the error terms being independent, not necessarily Gaussian, and having equal variances. It is well-known that the true underlying directed acyclic graph (DAG) encoding the causal structure is uniquely identifiable under this assumption. Interestingly, in this setting, it further holds that the sum of minimum expected…

因果推断中的外推正则化AI 解读

Many common estimators in machine learning and causal inference are linear smoothers, where the prediction is a weighted average of the training outcomes. Some estimators, such as ordinary least squares and kernel ridge regression, allow for arbitrarily negative weights, which improve feature imbalance but often at the cost of increased dependence on parametric modeling assumptions and higher variance. By contrast, estimators like importance weighting and random forests…

单侧不依从聚类随机试验中的潜在依从性贝叶斯建模AI 解读

In pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trials (PCRCTs), healthcare providers are randomized while both providers and patients may deviate from the assigned intervention. In many PCRCTs, cluster-level implementation is measured using multiple continuous metrics, while individual compliance is recorded as a binary indicator. Standard complier average causal effect (CACE) estimands focus on individual-level compliance and do not account for heterogeneity in implementation…

存在不依从时阶梯楔形设计的随机化推断：姑息治疗试验应用AI 解读

While palliative care is increasingly commonly delivered to hospitalized patients with serious illnesses, few studies have estimated its causal effects. Courtright et al. (2016) adopted a stepped-wedge cluster-randomized design to assess the effect of palliative care on a patient-centered outcome. The randomized intervention was a nudge to administer palliative care but did not guarantee receipt of palliative care, resulting in noncompliance. A subsequent analysis using…

时间序列中的动态局部平均处理效应AI 解读

This paper discusses identification, estimation, and inference on dynamic local average treatment effects (LATEs) in instrumental variables (IVs) settings. First, we show that compliers--observations whose treatment status is affected by the instrument--can be identified individually in time series data using smoothness assumptions and local comparisons of treatment assignments. Second, we show that this result enables not only better interpretability of IV estimates but…

用于多结果因果推断的逆回归AI 解读

With multiple outcomes in empirical research, a common strategy is to define a composite outcome as a weighted average of the original outcomes. However, the choices of weights are often subjective and can be controversial. We propose an inverse regression strategy for causal inference with multiple outcomes. The key idea is to regress the treatment on the outcomes, which is the inverse of the standard regression of the outcomes on the treatment. Although this strategy is…

意大利北部PM10评估的三种分布方法AI 解读

We propose three spatial methods for estimating the full probability distribution of PM10 concentrations, with the ultimate goal of assessing air quality in Northern Italy. Moving beyond spatial averages and simple indicators, we adopt a distributional perspective to capture the complex variability of pollutant concentrations across space. The first proposed approach predicts class-based compositions via Fixed Rank Kriging; the second estimates multiple, non-crossing…

超越平均效应：不完全依从下的分布因果推断AI 解读

We study the estimation of distributional treatment effects in randomized experiments with imperfect compliance. When participants do not adhere to their assigned treatments, we leverage treatment assignment as an instrumental variable to identify the local distributional treatment effect-the difference in outcome distributions between treatment and control groups for the subpopulation of compliers. We propose a regression-adjusted estimator based on a distribution…

面向信息物理安全的因果数字孪生：工业控制系统稳健异常检测框架AI 解读

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) in water distribution and treatment face cyber-physical attacks exploiting network and physical vulnerabilities. Current water system anomaly detection methods rely on correlations, yielding high false alarms and poor root cause analysis. We propose a Causal Digital Twin (CDT) framework for water infrastructures, combining causal inference with digital twin modeling. CDT supports association for pattern detection, intervention for system…

人工超级智能的决策理论视角：预测与处理选择中的缺失数据问题AI 解读

Enormous attention and resources are being devoted to the quest for artificial general intelligence and, even more ambitiously, artificial superintelligence. We wonder about the implications for methodological research that aims to help decision makers cope with what econometricians call identification problems, inferential problems in empirical research that do not diminish as sample size grows. Of particular concern are missing data problems in prediction and treatment…

回归模型中的对数与零值问题AI 解读

The log transformation is widely used in linear regression, mainly because coefficients are interpretable as proportional effects. Yet this practice has fundamental limitations, most notably that the log is undefined at zero, creating an identification problem. We propose a new estimator, iterated OLS (iOLS), which targets the normalized average treatment effect, preserving the percentage-change interpretation while addressing these limitations. Our procedure is the…

风险比、优势比与风险差：哪种因果效应尺度更易推广？AI 解读

There are many measures to report so-called treatment or causal effects: absolute difference, ratio, odds ratio, number needed to treat, and so on. The choice of a measure, e.g. absolute versus relative, is often debated because it leads to different impressions of the benefit or risk of a treatment. Besides, different causal measures may lead to various treatment effect heterogeneity: some input variables may have an influence on some causal measures and no effect at all on…