每日简报

局部平均处理效应框架下聚类数据的两阶段最小二乘AI 解读

To estimate the causal effect of an endogenous treatment using clustered data, the canonical two-stage least squares (2sls) estimates a linear regression of the outcome on treatment status using an instrumental variable (IV) and conducts inference with cluster-robust standard errors. When both the treatment and the IV vary within clusters, an alternative two-stage least squares with fixed effects (2sfe) additionally includes cluster indicators in the regression, thereby…

用于智能体流行病模型快速校准的机器学习方法AI 解读

Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used to study infectious disease dynamics, but their calibration is often computationally intensive, limiting their applicability in time-sensitive public health settings. We propose DeepIMC (Deep Inverse Mapping Calibration), a machine learning-based calibration framework that directly learns the inverse mapping from epidemic time series to epidemiological parameters. DeepIMC trains a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural…

具有层级结构的高维时间序列自回归建模AI 解读

Modern applications have made ubiquitous high-dimensional data, especially time-dependent data, with more and more complicated structures, and it also has become more frequent to encounter the scenario of hierarchical relationships among variables. However, there is still a lack of supervised learning tool in the literature for them. To fill this gap, we introduce a new model-designing framework, and it then combines with unsupervised factor modeling tools to form an…

非精确匹配观察研究中平均处理效应的随机化推断AI 解读

Matching is a widely used causal inference design that aims to approximate a randomized experiment using observational data by forming matched sets of treated and control units based on similarities in their covariates. Ideally, treated units are exactly matched with controls on these covariates, enabling randomization-based inference for treatment effects as in a randomized experiment, under the assumption of no unobserved covariates. However, inexact matching often occurs,…

内生性与异方差下删失分位数回归的分布效应AI 解读

Distributional effects, captured by quantile frameworks, are well-received for characterizing heterogeneous impacts of economic factors across the unobserved relative ranks. Censored outcome, endogenous regressor and heteroskedastic error are prevalent in empirical work, yet challenge the consistency of existing quantile estimation methods. This paper proposes a two-nested-step(TNS) estimation method for distributional effects in censored quantile models with endogeneity and…

网络依赖时间序列的频域分析：全球银行关联应用AI 解读

Financial spillovers in interconnected systems, such as global banking networks, require tools that capture temporal and frequency dynamics, while incorporating the underlying network topology. While current network time series models are developed in the time-domain, frequency-domain approaches, which reveal how cross-nodal dependencies vary across different cycles, remain under-explored. This paper develops a spectral analysis framework that accommodates flexible forms of…

结果分布偏移下处理效应推广的锐界AI 解读

Generalizing treatment effects from a randomized trial to a target population requires the assumption that potential outcome distributions are invariant across populations after conditioning on observed covariates. This assumption fails when unmeasured effect modifiers are distributed differently between trial participants and the target population. We develop a sensitivity analysis framework that bounds how much conclusions can change when this transportability assumption…

未知因果图上的因果老虎机：结合后门调整的置信上界AI 解读

The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the causal graph is known or impose restrictive structural assumptions. In this paper, we study causal bandit problems when the causal graph is unknown. We first consider Gaussian DAG models without latent confounders. By combining observational…

随机对照试验中存在竞争性伴发事件的处理效应估计AI 解读

The analysis of randomized controlled trials is often complicated by intercurrent events (IEs) -- events that occur after treatment initiation and affect either the interpretation or existence of outcome measurements. Examples include treatment discontinuation or the use of additional medications. In two recent clinical trials for systemic lupus erythematosus with complications of IEs, we classify the IEs into two broad categories: effect-informative (e.g., treatment…

通过基于模拟的推断改进因果评估的生成方法AI 解读

Generating synthetic datasets that accurately reflect real-world observational data is critical for evaluating causal estimators, but it remains a challenging task. Existing generative methods offer a solution by producing synthetic datasets anchored in the observed data (source data) while allowing variation in key parameters such as the treatment effect and amount of confounding bias. However, it is often unclear which generative methods to use and which values of…

因果空间中因果效应的细粒度分析AI 解读

The notion of causal effect is fundamental across many scientific disciplines. Traditionally, quantitative researchers have studied causal effects at the level of variables; for example, how a certain drug dose (W) causally affects a patient's blood pressure (Y). However, in many modern data domains, the raw variables-such as pixels in an image or tokens in a language model-do not have the semantic structure needed to formulate meaningful causal questions. In this paper, we…

贝叶斯层级不变预测AI 解读

We propose Bayesian Hierarchical Invariant Prediction (BHIP) reframing Invariant Causal Prediction (ICP) through the lens of Hierarchical Bayes. We leverage the hierarchical structure to explicitly test invariance of causal mechanisms under heterogeneous data, resulting in improved computational scalability for a larger number of predictors compared to ICP. Moreover, given its Bayesian nature BHIP enables the use of prior information. We evaluate BHIP on both synthetic and…

链式法则下的因果归因：统一自然选择、学习、经济学及其他学科AI 解读

Analysis often splits change into components. For example, how much of the observed variance is caused by genes or environment? In many cases, the split is ultimately made by the logic of the chain rule, which divides the difference of a product into two terms. Each term quantifies the partial difference associated with change in one component while holding the other component constant. The chain rule is of course widely known. However, this article argues that its deep…

利用大量弱交互矩的构造性工具变量识别与推断AI 解读

Instrumental variable methods are widely used for causal inference, but identification becomes especially challenging when instruments are weak and potentially invalid. These challenges are particularly pronounced in Mendelian randomization, where genetic variants serve as instruments and violations of exclusion restriction or independence assumptions are common. We propose MAGIC, a constructive and assumption-lean framework that achieves identification even when all…

检验给定潜变量条件独立性的广义四元约束AI 解读

The tetrad constraint is widely used to test whether four observed variables are conditionally independent given a latent variable, based on the fact that if four observed variables following a linear model are mutually independent after conditioning on an unobserved variable, then products of covariances of any two different pairs of these four variables are equal. It is an important tool for discovering a latent common cause or distinguishing between alternative linear…

自回归运动方程的通解AI 解读

We provide a complete description of the set of all solutions to a vector autoregressive law of motion. Every solution is shown to be the sum of three components, each corresponding to a directed flow of time. One component flows forward from the arbitrarily distant past; one flows backward from the arbitrarily distant future; and one flows outward from time zero. The three components are obtained by applying three complementary spectral projections to the solution, these…

基于实验预测广告增量效果：PIE 广告衡量方法AI 解读

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide the most credible estimates of advertising incrementality but are difficult to scale. We propose Predicted Incrementality by Experimentation (PIE), which reframes ad measurement as a campaign-level prediction problem. PIE uses a sample of RCTs to learn a mapping from campaign features to causal effects, then applies it to campaigns not run as RCTs. Because the RCTs identify the causal effects, PIE can incorporate post-determined…

概念发生漂移时的学习：混杂、不变性与降维AI 解读

Practitioners often face the challenge of deploying prediction models in new environments with shifted distributions of covariates and responses. With observational data, such shifts are often driven by unobserved confounding, and can in fact alter the concept of which model is best. This paper studies distribution shifts in the domain adaptation problem with unobserved confounding. We postulate a linear structural causal model to account for endogeneity and unobserved…

终末事件存在时多结局总处理效应的非参数估计AI 解读

As standards of care advance, patients are living longer and once-fatal diseases are becoming manageable. Clinical trials increasingly focus on reducing disease burden, which can be quantified by the timing and occurrence of multiple non-fatal clinical events. Most existing methods for the analysis of multiple event-time data require stringent modeling assumptions that can be difficult to verify empirically, leading to treatment efficacy estimates that forego…

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…

面向政策制定者的处理效应同质性非参数检验AI 解读

Recent work has focused on nonparametric estimation of conditional treatment effects, but inference has remained relatively unexplored. We propose a class of nonparametric tests for both quantitative and qualitative treatment effect heterogeneity. The tests can incorporate a variety of structured assumptions on the conditional average treatment effect, allow for both continuous and discrete covariates, and do not require sample splitting to obtain a tractable asymptotic null…