Related papers: The causal meaning of Fisher's average effect
The additive genetic effect is arguably the most important quantity inferred in animal and plant breeding analyses. The term effect indicates that it represents causal information, which is different from standard statistical concepts as…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
Under the potential outcomes framework, causal effects are defined as comparisons between potential outcomes under treatment and control. To infer causal effects from randomized experiments, Neyman proposed to test the null hypothesis of…
Causal evidence is needed to act and it is often enough for the evidence to point towards a direction of the effect of an action. For example, policymakers might be interested in estimating the effect of slightly increasing taxes on private…
I develop a framework for interpreting the forces that act on any population described by frequencies. The conservation of total frequency, or total probability, shapes the characteristics of force. I begin with Fisher's fundamental theorem…
One of the main tasks of causal inference is estimating well-defined causal parameters. One of the main causal parameters is the average causal effect (ACE) - the expected value of the individual level causal effects in the target…
Scientists frequently generalize population level causal quantities such as average treatment effect from a source population to a target population. When the causal effects are heterogeneous, differences in subject characteristics between…
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…
Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection states that the rate of change in a population's mean fitness equals its additive genetic variance in fitness. This implies that mean fitness should not decline in a constant environment,…
Recent approaches in causal inference have proposed estimating average causal effects that are local to some subpopulation, often for reasons of efficiency. These inferential targets are sometimes data-adaptive, in that they are dependent…
Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious…
Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…
Single-parameter summaries of variable effects in regression settings are desirable for ease of interpretation. However (partially) linear models for example, which would deliver these, may fit poorly to the data. On the other hand, an…
Analogies between evolutionary dynamics and statistical mechanics, such as Fisher's second-law-like "fundamental theorem of natural selection" and Wright's "fitness landscapes", have had a deep and fruitful influence on the development of…
Most causal inference studies rely on the assumption of overlap to estimate population or sample average causal effects. When data exhibit non-overlap, estimation of these estimands requires reliance on model specifications, due to poor…
Quantile Partial Effect (QPE) is a statistic associated with conditional quantile regression, measuring the effect of covariates at different levels. Our theory demonstrates that when the QPE of cause on effect is assumed to lie in a finite…
The basic properties of the Fisher information allow to reveal the statistical meaning of classical inequalities between mean functions. The properties applied to scale mixtures of Gaussian distributions lead to a new mean function of…
The Price equation partitions the change in the expected value of a population measure. The first component describes the partial change caused by altered frequencies. The second component describes the partial change caused by altered…
Ecological and evolutionary processes show various population dynamics depending on internal interactions and environmental changes. While crucial in predicting biological processes, discovering general relations for such nonlinear dynamics…
We extend Fisher's randomization test (FRT) to test conditional independence between observed outcomes and treatments given covariates in both randomized experiments and observational studies, with no restriction on the variable type of…