English
Related papers

Related papers: Regularizing Extrapolation in Causal Inference

200 papers

The tuning parameter selection strategy for penalized estimation is crucial to identify a model that is both interpretable and predictive. However, popular strategies (e.g., minimizing average squared prediction error via cross-validation)…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-10 Julia Holter , Jonathan Stallrich

We study the problem of learning causal models from observational data through the lens of interpolation and its counterpart -- regularization. A large volume of recent theoretical, as well as empirical work, suggests that, in highly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-21 Leena Chennuru Vankadara , Luca Rendsburg , Ulrike von Luxburg , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

Several problems in statistics involve the combination of high-variance unbiased estimators with low-variance estimators that are only unbiased under strong assumptions. A notable example is the estimation of causal effects while combining…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-25 Michael Oberst , Alexander D'Amour , Minmin Chen , Yuyan Wang , David Sontag , Steve Yadlowsky

Unbiased estimators are introduced for averaged Bregman divergences which generalize Stein's Unbiased (Predictive) Risk Estimator, and the minimization of these estimators is proposed as a regularization parameter selection method for…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-11-22 Elias S. Helou , Sandra A. Santos , Lucas E. A. Simões

Causal inference with observational studies often relies on the assumptions of unconfoundedness and overlap of covariate distributions in different treatment groups. The overlap assumption is violated when some units have propensity scores…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-19 Shu Yang , Peng Ding

Classical methods for quantile regression fail in cases where the quantile of interest is extreme and only few or no training data points exceed it. Asymptotic results from extreme value theory can be used to extrapolate beyond the range of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-23 Nicola Gnecco , Edossa Merga Terefe , Sebastian Engelke

Inferring the causal effect of a non-randomly assigned exposure on an outcome requires adjusting for common causes of the exposure and outcome to avoid biased conclusions. Notwithstanding the efforts investigators routinely make to measure…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

The propensity score is widely used for causal inference in observational studies, but common parametric estimators can produce biased and inefficient effect estimates when model assumptions are violated. Nonparametric approaches reduce…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-09 Maosen Peng , Yan Li , Chong Wu , Liang Li

This paper presents a weighted optimization framework that unifies the binary,multi-valued, continuous, as well as mixture of discrete and continuous treatment, under the unconfounded treatment assignment. With a general loss function, the…

Econometrics · Economics 2018-08-20 Chunrong Ai , Oliver Linton , Kaiji Motegi , Zheng Zhang

Predictive inference requires balancing statistical accuracy against informational complexity, yet the choice of complexity measure is usually imposed rather than derived. We treat econometric objects as predictive rules, mappings from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-16 Nicholas G. Polson , Daniel Zantedeschi

This paper introduces a framework for estimating fair optimal predictions using machine learning where the notion of fairness can be quantified using path-specific causal effects. We use a recently developed approach based on Lagrange…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Razieh Nabi , David Benkeser

In this paper, we consider recent progress in estimating the average treatment effect when extreme inverse probability weights are present and focus on methods that account for a possible violation of the positivity assumption. These…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-26 Roland A. Matsouaka , Yunji Zhou

Adaptive experiment designs can dramatically improve statistical efficiency in randomized trials, but they also complicate statistical inference. For example, it is now well known that the sample mean is biased in adaptive trials.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-16 Vitor Hadad , David A. Hirshberg , Ruohan Zhan , Stefan Wager , Susan Athey

This paper proposes a debiased estimator for causal effects in high-dimensional generalized linear models with binary outcomes and general link functions. The estimator augments a regularized regression plug-in with weights computed from a…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-21 Jing Kong

Maximum likelihood estimation in nonlinear models can exhibit substantial instability in finite samples when the data provide limited information about certain parameters. Such instability is driven by rare but extreme realizations of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Masamune Iwasawa

Modeling symptom progression to identify informative subjects for a new Huntington's disease clinical trial is problematic since time to diagnosis, a key covariate, can be heavily censored. Imputation is an appealing strategy where censored…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-11 Sarah C. Lotspeich , Tanya P. Garcia

We consider inference on a scalar regression coefficient under a constraint on the magnitude of the control coefficients. A class of estimators based on a regularized propensity score regression is shown to exactly solve a tradeoff between…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-08-11 Timothy B. Armstrong , Michal Kolesár , Soonwoo Kwon

In federated learning, differences in the data or objectives between the participating nodes motivate approaches to train a personalized machine learning model for each node. One such approach is weighted averaging between a locally trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Felix Grimberg , Mary-Anne Hartley , Sai P. Karimireddy , Martin Jaggi

Mediation analyses allow researchers to quantify the effect of an exposure variable on an outcome variable through a mediator variable. If a binary mediator variable is misclassified, the resulting analysis can be severely biased.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-19 Kimberly A. Hochstedler Webb , Martin T. Wells

Biased stochastic estimators, such as finite-differences for noisy gradient estimation, often contain parameters that need to be properly chosen to balance impacts from the bias and the variance. While the optimal order of these parameters…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-14 Henry Lam , Xinyu Zhang , Xuhui Zhang