每日简报

模型孪生随机化：重复个体处理效应的估计AI 解读

Temporally dense single-person "small data" have become widely available thanks to mobile apps and wearable sensors. Many caregivers and self-trackers want to use these data to help a specific person change their behavior to achieve desired health outcomes. Ideally, this involves discerning possible causes from correlations using that person's own observational time series data. In this paper, we estimate within-individual average treatment effects of physical activity on…

动态离散选择模型中的连续永久不可观测异质性AI 解读

In dynamic discrete choice (DDC) analysis, it is common to use mixture models to control for unobserved heterogeneity. However, consistent estimation typically requires both restrictions on the support of unobserved heterogeneity and a high-level injectivity condition that is difficult to verify. This paper provides primitive conditions for point identification of a broad class of DDC models with multivariate continuous permanent unobserved heterogeneity. The results apply…

语言模型作为因果效应生成器AI 解读

In this work, we present sequence-driven structural causal models (SD-SCMs), a framework for specifying causal models with user-defined structure and language-model-defined mechanisms. We characterize how an SD-SCM enables sampling from observational, interventional, and counterfactual distributions according to the desired causal structure. We then leverage this procedure to propose a new type of benchmark for causal inference methods, generating individual-level…

弱分布重叠下马尔可夫决策过程的离策略评估AI 解读

Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically efficient in large samples, and to allow for modular implementation where preliminary estimation tasks can be executed using standard reinforcement learning techniques. Existing results, however, make heavy use of a strong distributional overlap…

马尔可夫结构因果模型的规范表示：反事实推理框架AI 解读

Counterfactual reasoning aims at answering contrary-to-fact questions like ``Would have Alice recovered had she taken aspirin?'' and corresponds to the most fine-grained layer of causation. Critically, while many counterfactual statements cannot be falsified-even by randomized experiments-they underpin fundamental concepts like individual-wise fairness. Therefore, providing models to formalize and implement counterfactual beliefs remains a fundamental scientific problem. In…

不必完全排除：使用半工具变量开展因果推断AI 解读

This paper proposes semi-instrumental variables (semi-IVs) as an alternative to instrumental variables (IVs) to identify the causal effect of a binary (or discrete) endogenous treatment. A semi-IV is a less restrictive form of instrument: it affects the selection into treatment but is excluded only from one, not necessarily both, potential outcomes. Having two continuously distributed semi-IVs, one excluded from the potential outcome under treatment and the other from the…

存在样本选择的配对关系回归AI 解读

This paper addresses the sample selection problem in panel dyadic regression analysis. Dyadic data often include many zeros in the main outcomes due to the underlying network formation process. This not only contaminates popular estimators used in practice but also complicates the inference due to the dyadic dependence structure. We extend Kyriazidou (1997)'s approach to dyadic data and characterize the asymptotic distribution of our proposed estimator. The convergence rates…

反事实余循环：稳健且一致的反事实传输框架AI 解读

Estimating joint distributions (a.k.a. couplings) over counterfactual outcomes is central to personalized decision-making and treatment risk assessment. Two emergent frameworks with identifiability guarantees are: (i) bijective structural causal models (SCMs), which are flexible but brittle to mis-specified latent noise; and (ii) optimal-transport (OT) methods, which avoid latent noise assumptions but can produce incoherent counterfactual transports which fail to identify…

利用观测数据评价处理获益预测器：识别与混杂偏差AI 解读

A treatment benefit predictor (TBP) is a function that maps patient characteristics to an estimate of the treatment benefit for that patient. Such predictors support optimizing individualized treatment decisions, which are central to precision medicine. However, evaluating the predictive performance of a TBP is challenging, as this often must be conducted in a sample where treatment assignment is not random. After briefly reviewing several metrics for evaluating TBPs, we…

存在终末事件时复发事件期望次数的因果推断AI 解读

While recurrent event analyses have been extensively studied, limited attention has been given to causal inference within the framework of recurrent event analysis. We develop a multiply robust estimation framework for causal inference in recurrent event data with a terminal failure event. We define our estimand as the vector comprising both the expected number of recurrent events and the failure survival function evaluated along a sequence of landmark times. We show that…

交错处理事件研究中以处理队列为锚的稳健推断AI 解读

This paper proposes a cohort-anchored framework for robust inference in event studies with staggered adoption, building on Rambachan and Roth (2023). Robust inference based on event-study coefficients aggregated across cohorts can be misleading due to the dynamic composition of treated cohorts, especially when pre-trends differ across cohorts. My approach avoids this problem by operating at the cohort-period level. To address the additional challenge posed by time-varying…