English
Related papers

Related papers: Choosing a Proxy Metric from Past Experiments

200 papers

We propose a method for estimating long-term treatment effects with many short-term proxy outcomes: a central challenge when experimenting on digital platforms. We formalize this challenge as a latent variable problem where observed proxies…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-13 Apoorva Lal , Guido Imbens , Peter Hull

North star metrics and online experimentation play a central role in how technology companies improve their products. In many practical settings, however, evaluating experiments based on the north star metric directly can be difficult. The…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-20 Alessandro Zito , Dylan Greaves , Jacopo Soriano , Lee Richardson

In many scientific domains, including experimentation, researchers rely on measurements of proxy outcomes to achieve faster and more frequent reads, especially when the primary outcome of interest is challenging to measure directly. While…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-08 Steven Wilkins-Reeves , Alexandra N. M. Darmon , Deeksha Sinha

A recent literature considers causal inference using noisy proxies for unobserved confounding factors. The proxies are divided into two sets that are independent conditional on the confounders. One set of proxies are `negative control…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-10-11 Ben Deaner

We propose a method for learning linear models whose predictive performance is robust to causal interventions on unobserved variables, when noisy proxies of those variables are available. Our approach takes the form of a regularization term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Michael Oberst , Nikolaj Thams , Jonas Peters , David Sontag

Randomized experiments are the gold standard for evaluating the effects of changes to real-world systems. Data in these tests may be difficult to collect and outcomes may have high variance, resulting in potentially large measurement error.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-27 Benjamin Letham , Brian Karrer , Guilherme Ottoni , Eytan Bakshy

We consider the problem of indirect comparison, where a treatment arm of interest is absent by design in one randomized controlled trial but available in the other. The former is the target trial, and the latter is the source trial. The…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-06 Zehao Su , Helene C. W. Rytgaard , Henrik Ravn , Frank Eriksson

Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Sepehr Elahi , Sina Akbari , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash , Patrick Thiran

Predictive analytics is increasingly used to guide decision-making in many applications. However, in practice, we often have limited data on the true predictive task of interest, and must instead rely on more abundant data on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-07 Hamsa Bastani

This paper is concerned with the selection and estimation of fixed and random effects in linear mixed effects models. We propose a class of nonconcave penalized profile likelihood methods for selecting and estimating important fixed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-05 Yingying Fan , Runze Li

Synthetic control methods are widely used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in time-series settings. A common approach to estimate synthetic control weights is to regress the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-06 Chan Park , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

We investigate inference in a latent binary variable model where a noisy proxy of the latent variable is available, motivated by the variable perturbation effectiveness problem in single-cell CRISPR screens. The baseline approach is to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-29 Louis Deutsch , Eugene Katsevich

In this work we study the problem of measuring the fairness of a machine learning model under noisy information. Focusing on group fairness metrics, we investigate the particular but common situation when the evaluation requires controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Flavien Prost , Pranjal Awasthi , Nick Blumm , Aditee Kumthekar , Trevor Potter , Li Wei , Xuezhi Wang , Ed H. Chi , Jilin Chen , Alex Beutel

Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Feng Xie , Zhengming Chen , Shanshan Luo , Wang Miao , Ruichu Cai , Zhi Geng

How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-13 Jiawei Fu , Donald P. Green

A key trait of stochastic optimizers is that multiple runs of the same optimizer in attempting to solve the same problem can produce different results. As a result, their performance is evaluated over several repeats, or runs, on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Moslem Noori , Elisabetta Valiante , Thomas Van Vaerenbergh , Masoud Mohseni , Ignacio Rozada

Marginal structural models are a popular tool for investigating the effects of time-varying treatments, but they require an assumption of no unobserved confounders between the treatment and outcome. With observational data, this assumption…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-10 Matthew Blackwell , Soichiro Yamauchi

Across domains such as medicine, employment, and criminal justice, predictive models often target labels that imperfectly reflect the outcomes of interest to experts and policymakers. For example, clinical risk assessments deployed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Luke Guerdan , Amanda Coston , Kenneth Holstein , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Given the long follow-up periods that are often required for treatment or intervention studies, the potential to use surrogate markers to decrease the required follow-up time is a very attractive goal. However, previous studies have shown…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-12 Layla Parast , Tianxi Cai , Lu Tian

We present new results for nonparametric identification of causal effects using noisy proxies for unobserved confounders. Our approach builds on the results of \citet{Hu2008} who tackle the problem of general measurement error. We call this…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-05-05 Ben Deaner
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›