We analyze the extreme value dependence of independent, not necessarily identically distributed multivariate regularly varying random vectors. More specifically, we propose estimators of the spectral measure locally at some time point and of the spectral measures integrated over time. The uniform asymptotic normality of these estimators is proved under suitable nonparametric smoothness and regularity assumptions. We then use the process convergence of the integrated spectral measure to devise consistent tests for the null hypothesis that the spectral measure does not change over time. The finite sample performance of these tests is investigated in Monte Carlo simulations.
Treatment effect estimates are often available from randomized controlled trials as a single average treatment effect for a certain patient population. Estimates of the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) are more useful for individualized treatment decision making, but randomized trials are often too small to estimate the CATE. Examples in medical literature make use of the relative treatment effect (e.g. an odds-ratio) reported by randomized trials to estimate the CATE using large observational datasets. One approach to estimating these CATE models is by using the relative treatment effect as an offset, while estimating the covariate-specific untreated risk. We observe that the odds-ratios reported in randomized controlled trials are not the odds-ratios that are needed in offset models because trials often report the marginal odds-ratio. We introduce a constraint or regularizer to better use marginal odds-ratios from randomized controlled trials and find that under the standard observational causal inference assumptions this approach provides a consistent estimate of the CATE. Next, we show that the offset approach is not valid for CATE estimation in the presence of unobserved confounding. We study if the offset assumption and the marginal constraint lead to better approximations of the CATE relative to the alternative of using the average treatment effect estimate from the randomized trial. We empirically show that when the underlying CATE has sufficient variation, the constraint and offset approaches lead to closer approximations to the CATE.
Entanglement represents ``\textit{the}'' key resource for several applications of quantum information processing, ranging from quantum communications to distributed quantum computing. Despite its fundamental importance, deterministic generation of maximally entangled qubits represents an on-going open problem. Here, we design a novel generation scheme exhibiting two attractive features, namely, i) deterministically generating different classes -- namely, GHZ-like, W-like and graph states -- of genuinely multipartite entangled states, ii) without requiring any direct interaction between the qubits. Indeed, the only necessary condition is the possibility of coherently controlling -- according to the indefinite causal order framework -- the causal order among the unitaries acting on the qubits. Through the paper, we analyze and derive the conditions on the unitaries for deterministic generation, and we provide examples for unitaries practical implementation. We conclude the paper by discussing the scalability of the proposed scheme to higher dimensional genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) states and by introducing some possible applications of the proposal for quantum networks.
Recently, there has been great interest in estimating the conditional average treatment effect using flexible machine learning methods. However, in practice, investigators often have working hypotheses about effect heterogeneity across pre-defined subgroups of study units, which we call the groupwise approach. The paper compares two modern ways to estimate groupwise treatment effects, a nonparametric approach and a semiparametric approach, with the goal of better informing practice. Specifically, we compare (a) the underlying assumptions, (b) efficiency and adaption to the underlying data generating models, and (c) a way to combine the two approaches. We also discuss how to test a key assumption concerning the semiparametric estimator and to obtain cluster-robust standard errors if study units in the same subgroups are correlated. We demonstrate our findings by conducting simulation studies and reanalyzing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.
Randomized algorithms, such as randomized sketching or projections, are a promising approach to ease the computational burden in analyzing large datasets. However, randomized algorithms also produce non-deterministic outputs, leading to the problem of evaluating their accuracy. In this paper, we develop a statistical inference framework for quantifying the uncertainty of the outputs of randomized algorithms. We develop appropriate statistical methods -- sub-randomization, multi-run plug-in and multi-run aggregation inference -- by using multiple runs of the same randomized algorithm, or by estimating the unknown parameters of the limiting distribution. As an example, we develop methods for statistical inference for least squares parameters via random sketching using matrices with i.i.d.entries, or uniform partial orthogonal matrices. For this, we characterize the limiting distribution of estimators obtained via sketch-and-solve as well as partial sketching methods. The analysis of i.i.d. sketches uses a trigonometric interpolation argument to establish a differential equation for the limiting expected characteristic function and find the dependence on the kurtosis of the entries of the sketching matrix. The results are supported via a broad range of simulations.
When estimating an effect of an action with a randomized or observational study, that study is often not a random sample of the desired target population. Instead, estimates from that study can be transported to the target population. However, transportability methods generally rely on a positivity assumption, such that all relevant covariate patterns in the target population are also observed in the study sample. Strict eligibility criteria, particularly in the context of randomized trials, may lead to violations of this assumption. Two common approaches to address positivity violations are restricting the target population and restricting the relevant covariate set. As neither of these restrictions are ideal, we instead propose a synthesis of statistical and simulation models to address positivity violations. We propose corresponding g-computation and inverse probability weighting estimators. The restriction and synthesis approaches to addressing positivity violations are contrasted with a simulation experiment and an illustrative example in the context of sexually transmitted infection testing uptake. In both cases, the proposed synthesis approach accurately addressed the original research question when paired with a thoughtfully selected simulation model. Neither of the restriction approaches were able to accurately address the motivating question. As public health decisions must often be made with imperfect target population information, model synthesis is a viable approach given a combination of empirical data and external information based on the best available knowledge.
We consider the problem of learning from data corrupted by underrepresentation bias, where positive examples are filtered from the data at different, unknown rates for a fixed number of sensitive groups. We show that with a small amount of unbiased data, we can efficiently estimate the group-wise drop-out parameters, even in settings where intersectional group membership makes learning each intersectional rate computationally infeasible. Using this estimate for the group-wise drop-out rate, we construct a re-weighting scheme that allows us to approximate the loss of any hypothesis on the true distribution, even if we only observe the empirical error on a biased sample. Finally, we present an algorithm encapsulating this learning and re-weighting process, and we provide strong PAC-style guarantees that, with high probability, our estimate of the risk of the hypothesis over the true distribution will be arbitrarily close to the true risk.
Causal discovery and causal reasoning are classically treated as separate and consecutive tasks: one first infers the causal graph, and then uses it to estimate causal effects of interventions. However, such a two-stage approach is uneconomical, especially in terms of actively collected interventional data, since the causal query of interest may not require a fully-specified causal model. From a Bayesian perspective, it is also unnatural, since a causal query (e.g., the causal graph or some causal effect) can be viewed as a latent quantity subject to posterior inference -- other unobserved quantities that are not of direct interest (e.g., the full causal model) ought to be marginalized out in this process and contribute to our epistemic uncertainty. In this work, we propose Active Bayesian Causal Inference (ABCI), a fully-Bayesian active learning framework for integrated causal discovery and reasoning, which jointly infers a posterior over causal models and queries of interest. In our approach to ABCI, we focus on the class of causally-sufficient, nonlinear additive noise models, which we model using Gaussian processes. We sequentially design experiments that are maximally informative about our target causal query, collect the corresponding interventional data, and update our beliefs to choose the next experiment. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our approach is more data-efficient than several baselines that only focus on learning the full causal graph. This allows us to accurately learn downstream causal queries from fewer samples while providing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates for the quantities of interest.
We consider the problem of discovering $K$ related Gaussian directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where the involved graph structures share a consistent causal order and sparse unions of supports. Under the multi-task learning setting, we propose a $l_1/l_2$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for learning $K$ linear structural equation models. We theoretically show that the joint estimator, by leveraging data across related tasks, can achieve a better sample complexity for recovering the causal order (or topological order) than separate estimations. Moreover, the joint estimator is able to recover non-identifiable DAGs, by estimating them together with some identifiable DAGs. Lastly, our analysis also shows the consistency of union support recovery of the structures. To allow practical implementation, we design a continuous optimization problem whose optimizer is the same as the joint estimator and can be approximated efficiently by an iterative algorithm. We validate the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the joint estimator in experiments.
Causality can be described in terms of a structural causal model (SCM) that carries information on the variables of interest and their mechanistic relations. For most processes of interest the underlying SCM will only be partially observable, thus causal inference tries to leverage any exposed information. Graph neural networks (GNN) as universal approximators on structured input pose a viable candidate for causal learning, suggesting a tighter integration with SCM. To this effect we present a theoretical analysis from first principles that establishes a novel connection between GNN and SCM while providing an extended view on general neural-causal models. We then establish a new model class for GNN-based causal inference that is necessary and sufficient for causal effect identification. Our empirical illustration on simulations and standard benchmarks validate our theoretical proofs.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.