每日简报

从非结构化数据到需求反事实：理论与实践AI 解读

Empirical models of multi-product demand rely on low-dimensional product representations to capture substitution patterns, increasingly using proxies built from unstructured data. When proxies are imperfect, standard workflows yield biased counterfactuals and invalid inference. We develop a practical toolkit to address these issues. Our methods apply to market-level and/or individual data, require minimal additional computation, provide simple standard-error formulas, and…

处理与结果非随机缺失时，工具变量模型的可识别性AI 解读

The instrumental variable model of Imbens and Angrist (1994) and Angrist et al. (1996) identifies the local average treatment effect, also known as the complier average causal effect (CACE). In practice, however, the treatment and outcome are often missing, and when they are missing not at random (MNAR), the CACE is generally not identifiable without further assumptions, because the underlying data distribution itself cannot be recovered. We study when the CACE remains…

宽严度设计：操作指南AI 解读

We develop a step-by-step guide to leniency (a.k.a. judge or examiner instrument) designs, drawing on recent econometric literatures. The unbiased jackknife instrumental variables estimator (UJIVE) is purpose-built for leveraging exogenous leniency variation, avoiding subtle biases even in the presence of many decision-makers or controls. We show how UJIVE can also be used to assess key assumptions underlying leniency designs, including quasi-random assignment and average…

计数反向响应者：实验设计模型提供超越平均效应的证据AI 解读

Using only a binary intervention and outcome and the design of the randomization within an experiment, we construct a design-based likelihood of the joint distribution of potential outcomes in the sample -- the numbers of always takers, compliers, defiers, and never takers. We develop a visualization to show that samples with defiers can sometimes generate the data in more ways than samples without, yielding a higher likelihood. This likelihood can vary within the Frechet…

兼顾未知的证据聚合：学习效应原型与知识边界AI 解读

When evaluating policy interventions, researchers often pursue two related goals: identifying which individuals or contexts benefit most, and determining whether patterns of treatment effect heterogeneity can be used to aggregate evidence across environments. We develop a framework that aggregates treatment effect heterogeneity, defined over individual and environmental characteristics, into interpretable summaries while setting aside contexts in which extrapolation is…

从随机重启中进行推断AI 解读

Random-restart heuristics are widely used in nonconvex optimization and equilibrium computation: practitioners run a local algorithm from many initial conditions and interpret repeated convergence to the same output as evidence that the result is robust, dominant, or even unique. Despite its widespread use, this reasoning is usually informal. We provide a probabilistic framework for interpreting restart evidence. We give broad, easy-to-verify sufficient conditions under…

暴露与结局均存在缺失时的因果推断AI 解读

Missing data are ubiquitous in public health research. When estimating causal effects, there are well-established methods to address bias to due missing outcomes. Commonly, causal estimands are defined under hypothetical interventions to "set" the exposure and to prevent missingness. We demonstrate how this framework can be extended to missing exposures. We further extend this framework to incorporate missingness on the baseline outcome, which induces missingness on the…

评估扩大筛查与改善结局策略总效应的因果框架AI 解读

For many health conditions, there are highly efficacious treatment and prevention products. Maximizing their impact requires strategies that improve the reach of health screening in order to establish who could benefit. For example, HIV prevention strategies aim to expand risk screening and to improve uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among those experiencing risk. Often, these strategies induce changes at the group-level (e.g., health clinics or communities) and are…

通过剖面化迁移学习消除混杂AI 解读

Unmeasured confounders are a major source of bias in regression-based effect estimation and causal inference. In this paper, we propose a new profiled transfer learning framework, ProTrans, to address confounding effects in the target dataset, when additional source datasets with similar confounding structures are available. We introduce the concept of profiled residuals to characterize the shared confounding patterns between source and target datasets. By incorporating…