每日简报

实验设计的极限：超越低维的协变量平衡AI 解读

We study how fast experimental designs can approach the semiparametric efficiency bound in finite samples, as measured by the excess variance of unadjusted treatment effect estimation. We prove an impossibility theorem: under weak conditions, no design can approach the variance bound uniformly over smooth outcome models unless covariate dimension $d \ll \log n$. Even in experiments with thousands of units, this permits only a handful of covariates. Motivated by this, we…

中断时间序列的因果中介分析：稳定中介加权及车辆排放政策应用AI 解读

Population-level policies are introduced at a fixed time and evaluated from a single series of aggregate outcomes, and the interrupted time series design estimates the total shift in an outcome after the intervention. When the policy is expected to act through a measurable pathway, the total effect is less informative than its decomposition into direct and indirect effects. We formulate causal mediation for a single interrupted time series and study stabilized mediator…

质心参照马氏匹配：大规模观察研究的因果推断框架AI 解读

Matching for causal inference can be computationally expensive at scale and can silently change the target population when overlap is limited. We propose Centroid-Referenced Mahalanobis Matching (CRM), which replaces global pairwise search with stratified sampling in two reference coordinates: each unit's Mahalanobis distance from the treated centroid and its Fisher coordinate along the treated-control mean shift. All covariates enter through the treated covariance geometry;…

用于季节性传染病干预因果评估的贝叶斯疫情对齐AI 解读

Seasonal infectious-disease interventions are commonly evaluated with interrupted time-series or pre--post designs that align epidemics by calendar week. When epidemic onset, speed or peak timing differs between seasons, such comparisons confound a shift in epidemic phase with a change in disease burden. We propose a Bayesian causal count model in which season-specific affine transformations map calendar time to a latent epidemic clock, and intervention effects are estimated…

不要丢弃单例：独立流失下配对实验的有效推断AI 解读

Pairwise randomization can yield substantial efficiency gains in experiments. Yet methodological guidance cautions against pairwise randomization, especially in settings with attrition, partly because common practices for estimation (i.e., pair fixed effects) imply discarding data from incomplete pairs thus exacerbating data loss from attrition. This practice of dropping incomplete pairs reduces statistical power of tests as well as precision of estimates, in paired…

协变量分布迁移下连续处理效应的因果推广AI 解读

Average dose-response functions are widely used to summarize causal effects of continuous treatments, but most existing methods assume that the observed sample represents the target population. We study a covariate-shift setting in which covariates, treatment, and outcome are observed in a labelled source sample, while only covariates are observed in the target sample. We develop a two-sample local polynomial regression framework based on pseudo-outcomes that use source…

诊断测试与人工智能医疗器械的因果评估：效应修饰与信息增强决策AI 解读

Diagnostic medical tests and devices provide useful information for evaluating the potential benefits and risks of therapeutic treatments. However, unlike treatments, their impact on health outcomes is generally indirect because measuring diagnostic information typically does not itself affect patient outcomes, which complicates evaluation of their effectiveness. In this work, we develop a causal inference approach for evaluating diagnostic tests by distinguishing…

鞅 R 学习器：事件时间结果的时变异质性治疗效应估计AI 解读

Biological research and clinical evidence suggest that treatment response may vary substantially along characteristics, such as comorbidities, genetic variants, environmental, or socio-economic factors. Future precision medicine requires accurate assessment of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) to guide optimal clinical decisions at the individual level. We introduce a functional score framework that extends the traditional estimating equations for survival data to…

矩条件模型的曲率校准准贝叶斯更新AI 解读

Moment restrictions provide a flexible basis for quasi-Bayesian inference when a full likelihood is unavailable, but the weighting matrix in a quadratic moment criterion determines both the relative importance of the moments and the information scale of posterior updating. We propose curvature-calibrated quasi-Bayesian updating, which uses the inverse of the covariance (or long-run covariance) of the moment conditions evaluated at a self-consistent quasi-posterior center.…

非恒定效应因果加性模型中的工具变量集合有效性检验AI 解读

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are powerful for causal effect estimation with unmeasured confounding, but in practice researchers often face a set of candidate IVs whose validity is difficult to determine from observational data. This paper studies the problem of testing the validity of IV sets under Causal Additive Models with Non-Constant Effects (CAM-NCE). To address this problem, we propose a testable condition, termed the Cross Auxiliary-based independence Test…

分类处理下个体化处理规则的部分识别学习AI 解读

We develop a partial identification learning framework for individualized treatment rules (ITRs) with categorical treatments, outcomes, and instrumental variables. Rather than relying on strong causal assumptions required for point identification, our framework leverages causal bounds to characterize the optimal treatment decision. Existing methods for ITR optimization under partial identification are largely restricted to binary treatment settings and the bounds derived by…

病例对照研究中基于倾向得分的因果推断AI 解读

Propensity score methods for causal inference are increasingly being used in cohort and experimental designs, but their development and uptake in outcome-dependent sampling schemes, such as case-control studies, remains limited. Case-control studies involve the sampling of individuals with and without an outcome of interest with the goal of estimating the effects of past exposures. When the design is observational, statistical adjustment for confounding bias is necessary. In…

多方法因果证据综合：以跨方法趋同证据排序候选驱动因素AI 解读

Practitioners inferring causality from observational data usually rely on a single method and treat its output as causal truth. Recent tools select an optimal method for a dataset, and recent ensembles aggregate multiple causal-discovery algorithms into one graph, but little work pools evidence across different mathematical traditions, including non-causal ones. We present Multi-Method Causal Evidence Synthesis (MCES), a framework that ranks which candidate drivers in an…

靶向深度生存对比：神经网络下处理特定生存收益的有效推断AI 解读

Neural survival models are increasingly asked to support counterfactual claims---how much a treatment would change survival in a population---rather than only prognostic risk scores. Answering such questions from observational data requires valid inference for treatment-specific survival contrasts under confounding and covariate-dependent censoring, targets for which standard deep survival estimators are biased and provide no honest uncertainty. We propose Targeted Deep…

让时间提供信息：中断时间序列的识别与高斯过程估计AI 解读

We study causal inference in interrupted time series designs where a treatment affects every unit simultaneously, so that the contemporaneous controls used by difference-in-differences and synthetic control are unavailable and the counterfactual must be extrapolated from a unit's own pre-treatment history. We establish identification within the potential outcomes framework and estimate the counterfactual by Gaussian process regression. Rather than committing to a single…

在线实验的隐私预算框架AI 解读

Firms perform online experiments with multi-armed bandits to personalize what consumers are shown while balancing exploration and exploitation. However, third-parties can infer consumers' underlying segments from observing which banners, ads, or recommendations consumers receive. To control this inference, we propose a privacy risk budget that firms can set ex ante to bound such third party belief updating using differential privacy. To spend this privacy risk budget, we…

利用 SIMEX 估计真实效应量分布AI 解读

Large-scale online experimentation produces noisy effect estimates, which can overstate gains and complicate decisions about launches and testing policies. We propose a nonparametric method based on SIMulation-EXtrapolation (SIMEX) to estimate the latent distribution of true effects from estimated average treatment effects with known variances. The method evaluates quantiles after adding progressively more simulated measurement noise and extrapolates the resulting inverse…

复数域稀疏可分因子分析及局部场电位数据应用AI 解读

Complex-valued arrays arise in signal processing, where scientific interpretation depends on retaining amplitude and phase information. Existing covariance estimation methods either ignore the multiway organization of such data or rely on real-domain embeddings that do not directly exploit their complex structure. We develop sparse separable factor analysis (SSFA), a latent factor model for complex-valued arrays with a separable covariance structure across modes. Each…

异常值影响：依据统计后果进行检测AI 解读

We introduce a novel outlier detection method that utilizes a concrete measure of the statistical impact of an outlier rather than a vague notion of "unusualness". This allows practitioners to only flag points that materially affect the inferences made from the data while also ensuring these points are anomalous. This is of particular interest in experimentation, where outliers affect the validity of the causal inferences. In particular, we consider a potential outlier's…

阈值筛选单臂前后研究的均值回归调整样本量设计AI 解读

Studies enrolling participants on the basis of an extreme baseline value are susceptible to regression to the mean (RTM), such that some observed pre-post change is expected even without treatment. Existing methods estimate and decompose RTM retrospectively. We extend this framework to prospective study design by deriving a closed-form sample-size method for continuous, cutoff-selected, single-arm pre-post studies. The method partitions anticipated total change into that…

非高斯状态空间模型的精确拒绝采样AI 解读

Rejection sampling requires a proposal that dominates the target by a known constant, generally unavailable for non-Gaussian state space models. We construct such a proposal for the latent state path, yielding independent exact smoothing draws and an unbiased likelihood estimator whose relative variance is at most $1/p-1$ per draw at acceptance probability $p$. The method covers scalar states with affine Gaussian dynamics and log-concave observation densities, including…

采用矩阵负二项抽稀的新型矩阵整数值自回归过程AI 解读

To address the overdispersion problem in matrix-variate integer-valued time series data arising in sociology, medicine, and related fields, this paper proposes a matrix integer-valued autoregressive model based on the negative binomial thinning operator. By introducing left and right matricial negative binomial thinning operators, the proposed model not only preserves the integer-valued nature of the data but also effectively handles overdispersion. The probabilistic and…

多重处理因果推断中的重心融合 Gromov–Wasserstein 平衡AI 解读

Estimating heterogeneous single and interaction treatment effects from observational data under multiple simultaneous treatments is crucial for decision-making. To mitigate estimation variance, previous studies balance representation distributions between every pair of treatment patterns. However, such pairwise balancing scales quadratically with the number of treatment patterns and fails to preserve consistent local proximity structures across patterns, which degrades…

分布双重差分：分位数反演前聚合还是反演后聚合？AI 解读

Staggered distributional difference-in-differences produces cohort-specific potential-outcome distributions, but applied work typically wants one overall quantile treatment effect. Two natural summaries---averaging cohort quantile treatment effects (QTTs) and mixing cohort distributions before inversion---use the same policy weights yet answer different target-population questions and can disagree even in sign. We derive the exact sharp interval for their gap conditional on…