Identification of Latent Group Effects under Conditional Calibration
Abstract
We study identification of a structural group effect when the group indicator is unobserved but the analyst observes a calibrated probability score satisfying . Under a constant-coefficient structural mean model, the latent-group coefficient is point-identified from the joint law of observables by a simple ratio of weighted moments: the covariance of the signed score with the covariate-partialled outcome, divided by twice the residual variance of the score after conditioning on covariates. Identification fails if and only if the score is a deterministic function of ; we establish this by constructing an explicit continuum of observationally equivalent models indexed by arbitrary values of . The identified coefficient differs from the marginal latent mean gap by a compositional term that is unidentified without further assumptions; we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the two to coincide. The oracle estimator is -consistent and asymptotically normal with a closed-form sandwich variance. Under calibration error bounded uniformly by , the bias is bounded by , a bound that is sharp over all calibration error functions of that magnitude. Hard-threshold classification at attenuates the estimated gap by a factor strictly less than one. Monte Carlo experiments confirm the asymptotic theory, trace the divergence of RMSE as , illustrate the attenuation bias of hard-threshold classification, and verify identification of the variance-weighted estimand under heterogeneous effects.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.08798,
title = {Identification of Latent Group Effects under Conditional Calibration},
author = {Marcell T. Kurbucz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08798},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
31 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables