每日简报

生成式人工智能辅助的非结构化数据动态因果推断AI 解读

A growing number of scholars seek to estimate causal effects of unstructured data such as text, images, and video. However, existing methods typically treat each object as a single, static observation. We develop a statistical framework for dynamic causal inference with unstructured data by leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models. Our approach enables researchers to estimate the causal effects of sequences of treatment features, including their positions…

弱代理变量下近端因果学习的同时推断AI 解读

Proximal causal learning uses the treatment-inducing proxy and the outcome-inducing proxy through the outcome bridge and the treatment bridge to provide a way to address unobserved confounding in observational studies. This paper studies simultaneous inference for the marginal counterfactual distribution and quantile treatment effect under weak proxies. First, we propose a measure of weak-proxy strength and tightens the population-bias bound for the counterfactual CDF…

BGM-IV：面向高维协变量工具变量回归的贝叶斯生成建模AI 解读

Instrumental-variable (IV) regression enables causal estimation under endogeneity, but modern IV problems often involve nonlinear structural effects and high-dimensional covariates. Existing methods typically operate in observed or generic learned feature spaces, and they often yield point estimates without uncertainty quantification. We introduce BGM-IV, a Bayesian generative modeling approach that performs nonlinear IV regression through posterior inference in a causally…

从稀缺且含噪的动态观测中进行贝叶斯超图推断AI 解读

Inferring higher-order interaction structure from observations of dynamics is a central challenge in complex systems, particularly when data are scarce, noisy, or concentrated in lower-dimensional regions of state space. We develop Bayes-THIS, a Bayesian extension of Taylor-based Hypergraph Inference using SINDy (THIS), which reconstructs hypergraph structure from time-series data by identifying sparse Taylor coefficients associated with pairwise and higher-order…

因果状态依赖局部投影AI 解读

State-dependent local projections (LPs) are widely used to study how causal effects vary as a function of economic states, but shock exogeneity alone does not identify this response function. We show that identification follows when the underlying conditional mean is linear in the shock with a state-dependent coefficient, a condition satisfied in canonical micro-macro environments, including first-order perturbation solutions of heterogeneous-agent and macro-finance models.…

弱信号与重尾：学习理论与极值分析的结合AI 解读

The masses of data now available have opened up the prospect of discovering weak signals using machine-learning algorithms, with a view to predictive or interpretation tasks. As this survey of recent results attempts to show, bringing multivariate extreme value theory and statistical learning theory together in a common, nonparametric and nonasymptotic framework makes it possible to design and analyze new methods for exploiting the scarce information located in distribution…

网络依赖与干扰下双重差分的高效非参数估计AI 解读

Differences-in-differences (DiD) is a causal inference method for observational longitudinal data that assumes parallel expected potential outcome trajectories between treatment groups under the counterfactual scenario where all units receive a specific treatment. In this paper DiD is extended to allow for: (i) non-identically distributed treatment effects and exposure probabilities; (ii) interference, where treatment of one unit can affect outcomes in neighboring units; and…

基于 e 值的序贯随机化检验及试验监测AI 解读

Sequential monitoring of randomized trials traditionally relies on parametric assumptions or asymptotic approximations. We discuss a family of nonparametric sequential tests - collectively called e-RT - for binary, event-only, and continuous endpoints. All active variants derive validity from the randomization mechanism. Using a betting framework, each test constructs a test martingale by sequentially wagering on randomized assignments or observed event labels before using…

随机对照试验中平均处理效应的无偏回归调整估计AI 解读

This article introduces a leave-one-out regression adjustment (LOORA) for estimating average treatment effects in randomized controlled trials. In finite samples, LOORA removes the bias of conventional regression adjustment and yields exact variance formulas for regression-adjusted Horvitz-Thompson and difference-in-means estimators. Ridge regularization curbs the influence of high-leverage observations, improving stability and precision in small samples. In large samples,…

可容许误设的 GMM：准贝叶斯方法AI 解读

Structural estimation in economics often makes use of models formulated in terms of moment conditions. While these moment conditions are generally well-motivated, it is often unknown whether the moment restrictions hold exactly. We consider a framework where researchers model their belief about the potential degree of misspecification via a prior distribution and adopt a quasi-Bayesian approach for performing inference on structural parameters. We provide quasi-posterior…

用偏相关图LASSO识别网络枢纽AI 解读

Graphical LASSO (GLASSO) is a widely used method for estimating sparse precision matrices and learning undirected graphical models in high-dimensional settings. Because GLASSO penalizes entries of the precision matrix directly, however, it is not scale-invariant. Partial Correlation Graphical LASSO (PCGLASSO), introduced by Carter et al. (2024), addresses this limitation by penalizing partial correlations, which directly characterize conditional dependence. In this paper, we…

时变行动下处理复发事件与半竞争事件的新型 g 计算算法AI 解读

Background: A core aspect of epidemiology is determining the impacts of potential public health interventions over time. With long follow-up periods, epidemiologists may need to consider semi-competing events, in which a terminal event, like death, precludes a non-terminal event, like hypertension. Time-varying confounding poses an additional challenge when studying time-varying interventions or actions. Existing methods do not simultaneously address semi- competing events…

更精确的测量还是更大的样本？存在未观测异质性时的政策学习数据采集AI 解读

Empirical research shows that individuals' responses to treatments vary along latent characteristics, such as innate ability or motivation. Therefore, a policymaker seeking to maximize welfare may consider designing policies based on observed characteristics and estimated latent traits. I characterize how the estimates' precision affects the worst-case performance of policies deriving rate-sharp regret bounds for assignment rules that include or exclude them, highlighting…

用于异质性处理效应可扩展推断的倾向得分拼接克里金AI 解读

Gaussian process-based models are attractive for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE), but their computational cost limits scalability in causal inference settings. In this work, we address this challenge by extending Patchwork Kriging into the causal inference framework. Our proposed method partitions the data according to the estimated propensity score and applies Patchwork Kriging to enforce continuity of HTE estimates across adjacent regions. By imposing…

PRCD-MAP：在因果发现中学习对不完美先验的信任程度AI 解读

External priors of unknown reliability create a brittle trade-off in causal discovery: blind trust amplifies errors, blind rejection wastes signal. Real priors are also heterogeneously reliable -- physical laws are trustworthy, LLM-suggested edges are speculative -- yet existing methods either ignore priors or impose them through globally uniform trust. We propose PRCD-MAP, a soft prior-consumption layer that assigns per-edge trust to an imperfect prior and uses it to…

用于高维因果生存分析的马蹄先验森林AI 解读

We develop a Bayesian tree ensemble model to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in censored survival data with high-dimensional covariates. Instead of imposing sparsity through the tree structure, we place a horseshoe prior directly on the step heights to achieve adaptive global-local shrinkage. This strategy allows flexible regularisation and reduces noise. We develop a reversible jump Gibbs sampler to accommodate the non-conjugate horseshoe prior within the tree…

仅用分类与少量回归实现逆强化学习AI 解读

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer rewards from observed behavior, but rewards are not identified from the policy alone: many reward--value pairs can rationalize the same actions. Meaningful reward recovery therefore requires a normalization, yet existing normalized IRL methods often rely on anchor-action restrictions or specialized neural architectures. We study reward recovery in the maximum-entropy, or Gumbel-shock, model under a broad class of statewise…

时间序列政策决策中的计量方法与因果结构学习：英国新冠政策证据AI 解读

Causal machine learning (ML) recovers graphical structures that inform us about potential cause-and-effect relationships. Most progress has focused on cross-sectional data with no explicit time order, whereas recovering causal structures from time series data remains the subject of ongoing research in causal ML. In addition to traditional causal ML, this study assesses econometric methods that some argue can recover causal structures from time series data. The use of these…

调查实验中的协变量平衡AI 解读

The survey experiment is widely used in economics and social sciences to evaluate the effects of treatments or programs. In a standard population-based survey experiment, the experimenter randomly draws experimental units from a target population of interest and then randomly assigns the sampled units to treatment or control conditions to explore the treatment effect of an intervention. Simple random sampling and treatment assignment can balance covariates on average.…

处理效应异质性的变量重要性推断：Shapley 值及其拓展AI 解读

We provide an inferential framework to assess variable importance for heterogeneous treatment effects. This assessment is especially useful in high-risk domains such as medicine, where decision makers hesitate to rely on black-box treatment recommendation algorithms. The variable importance measures we consider are local in that they may differ across individuals, while the inference is global in that it tests whether a given variable is important for any individual. Our…

结果缺失下的多环境不变性学习AI 解读

Learning models that can handle distribution shifts is a key challenge in domain generalization. Invariance learning, an approach that focuses on identifying features invariant across environments, improves model generalization by capturing stable relationships, which may represent causal effects when the data distribution is encoded within a structural equation model (SEM) and satisfies modularity conditions. This has led to a growing body of work that builds on invariance…

从异质性效应中提取机制：中介分析的识别策略AI 解读

Understanding causal mechanisms is crucial for explaining and generalizing empirical phenomena. Causal mediation analysis offers statistical techniques to quantify the mediation effects. Although numerous methods have been developed for causal inference more broadly, the methodological toolkit for causal mediation analysis remains limited. Current methods often require multiple ignorability assumptions or sophisticated research designs. In this paper, we introduce an…

因果发现应拥抱群体智慧AI 解读

This paper argues for recognizing an emerging paradigm of causal learning by wisdom of the crowd. Recent developments in government, industry, and research point to the rise of decentralized and crowd-based approaches within causal modeling, where causal knowledge distributed across many contributors can be systematically elicited and integrated with causal learning workflows. In this paradigm, causal learning becomes a distributed decision-making problem: each participant…

利用定向工具变量识别处理效应AI 解读

Multivalued treatments are commonplace in applications. We explore the use of discrete-valued instruments to control for selection bias in this setting. Our discussion revolves around the concept of targeting: which instruments target which treatments. It allows us to establish conditions under which counterfactual averages and treatment effects are point- or partially-identified for composite complier groups. We explore the additional identifying power of a positive…