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Suppose we are interested in the effect of a treatment in a clinical trial. The efficiency of inference may be limited due to small sample size. However, external control data are often available from historical studies. Motivated by an…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-10 Xinyu Li , Wang Miao , Fang Lu , Xiao-Hua Zhou

Experimental work regularly finds that individual choices are not deterministically rationalized by well-defined preferences. Nonetheless, recent work shows that data collected from many individuals can be stochastically rationalized by a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-10-22 Changkuk Im , John Rehbeck

This paper studies the robustness of estimated policy effects to changes in the distribution of covariates, a key determinant of the external validity of (quasi)-experimental results. I propose a novel robustness metric $\delta^*$ which…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-27 Pietro Emilio Spini

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, researchers are reporting findings of randomized trials comparing standard care with care augmented by experimental drugs. The trials have small sample sizes, so estimates of treatment effects are…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-06-02 Charles F. Manski , Aleksey Tetenov

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) represent a gold standard when developing policy guidelines. However, RCTs are often narrow, and lack data on broader populations of interest. Causal effects in these populations are often estimated using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Zeshan Hussain , Michael Oberst , Ming-Chieh Shih , David Sontag

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov

Can instrumental variables be found from data? While instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to identify causal effect, testing their validity from observed data remains a challenge. This is because validity of an IV depends on…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-05 Amit Sharma

The target trial framework enables causal inference from longitudinal observational data by emulating randomized trials initiated at multiple time points. Precision is often improved by pooling information across trials, with standard…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-08 Edoardo Efrem Gervasoni , Liesbet De Bus , Stijn Vansteelandt , Oliver Dukes

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

Applied researchers are increasingly interested in whether and how treatment effects vary in randomized evaluations, especially variation not explained by observed covariates. We propose a model-free approach for testing for the presence of…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-12-17 Peng Ding , Avi Feller , Luke Miratrix

We develop our previous works concerning the identification of the collection of significant factors determining some, in general, non-binary random response variable. Such identification is important, e.g., in biological and medical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-06-05 Alexander V. Bulinski , Alexander S. Rakitko

Improving public policy is one of the key roles of governments, and they can do this in an evidence-based way using administrative data. Causal inference for observational data improves on current practice of using descriptive or predictive…

Applications · Statistics 2023-01-18 Elena Tartaglia , Peter Rankin

When estimating causal effects, it is important to assess external validity, i.e., determine how useful a given study is to inform a practical question for a specific target population. One challenge is that the covariate distribution in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Zhenghao Zeng , Edward H. Kennedy , Lisa M. Bodnar , Ashley I. Naimi

We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Masahiro Kato , Masatoshi Uehara , Shota Yasui

We study the problem of choosing optimal policy rules in uncertain environments using models that may be incomplete and/or partially identified. We consider a policymaker who wishes to choose a policy to maximize a particular counterfactual…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-12-22 Thomas M. Russell

In cluster analysis, it can be useful to interpret the partition built from the data in the light of external categorical variables which were not directly involved to cluster the data. An approach is proposed in the model-based clustering…

Statistical analysis is an important tool to distinguish systematic from chance findings. Current statistical analyses rely on distributional assumptions reflecting the structure of some underlying model, which if not met lead to problems…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-11-15 Orestis Loukas , Ho Ryun Chung

High-dimensional tests are applied to find relevant sets of variables and relevant models. If variables are selected by analyzing the sums of products matrices and a corresponding mean-value test is performed, there is the danger that the…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-02-10 Juergen Laeuter , Maciej Rosolowski , Ekkehard Glimm

Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-09 Stephen Bates , Michael I. Jordan , Michael Sklar , Jake A. Soloff

Randomized experiments are an excellent tool for estimating internally valid causal effects with the sample at hand, but their external validity is frequently debated. While classical results on the estimation of Population Average…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-13 Apoorva Lal , Wenjing Zheng , Simon Ejdemyr