论文标题
增强IPW估计器的新的中央限制定理:差异通货膨胀,跨拟合协方差及以后
A New Central Limit Theorem for the Augmented IPW Estimator: Variance Inflation, Cross-Fit Covariance and Beyond
论文作者
论文摘要
平均治疗效果(ATE)的估计是因果推断的核心问题。近来,在存在高维协变量的情况下对ATE的推论进行了广泛的研究。在提出的各种方法中,具有交叉拟合的增强的反可能性加权(AIPW)在实践中成为了一种流行的选择。在这项工作中,我们在高维度的特征和样品数量均大且可比性的高维度中研究了该交叉拟合AIPW估计器在明确的结果回归和倾向得分模型中。根据对协变量分布的假设,我们为适当缩放的交叉拟合AIPW建立了一个新的中央限制定理,该定理适用于基础高维参数而没有任何稀疏性假设。我们的CLT发现了两个关键现象:(i)AIPW表现出很大的差异通货膨胀,可以通过信噪比和其他问题参数来精确量化,(ii)在根范围甚至在根尺度上,前互构估计器之间的渐近估计估计量之间的渐近共价性。这些发现与他们的经典同行有着明显的不同。在技术方面,我们的工作利用了三种不同的工具之间的新颖相互作用 - 鲜明的信息传递理论,确定性等效的理论和一对一的方法。我们认为,我们的证明技术对于在此高维度中分析其他两阶段估计器应该很有用。最后,我们通过模拟来补充理论结果,这些模拟既证明了CLT的有限样品疗效及其对假设的鲁棒性。
Estimation of the average treatment effect (ATE) is a central problem in causal inference. In recent times, inference for the ATE in the presence of high-dimensional covariates has been extensively studied. Among the diverse approaches that have been proposed, augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW) with cross-fitting has emerged a popular choice in practice. In this work, we study this cross-fit AIPW estimator under well-specified outcome regression and propensity score models in a high-dimensional regime where the number of features and samples are both large and comparable. Under assumptions on the covariate distribution, we establish a new central limit theorem for the suitably scaled cross-fit AIPW that applies without any sparsity assumptions on the underlying high-dimensional parameters. Our CLT uncovers two crucial phenomena among others: (i) the AIPW exhibits a substantial variance inflation that can be precisely quantified in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio and other problem parameters, (ii) the asymptotic covariance between the pre-cross-fit estimators is non-negligible even on the root-n scale. These findings are strikingly different from their classical counterparts. On the technical front, our work utilizes a novel interplay between three distinct tools--approximate message passing theory, the theory of deterministic equivalents, and the leave-one-out approach. We believe our proof techniques should be useful for analyzing other two-stage estimators in this high-dimensional regime. Finally, we complement our theoretical results with simulations that demonstrate both the finite sample efficacy of our CLT and its robustness to our assumptions.