Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userBayesian Matrix Completion Approach to Causal Inference with Panel Data
64
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Masahiro Tanaka
Publication date
2019
fields
Mathematical Statistics
and research's language is
English
Authors
Masahiro Tanaka
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
This study proposes a new Bayesian approach to infer binary treatment effects. The approach treats counterfactual untreated outcomes as missing observations and infers them by completing a matrix composed of realized and potential untreated outcomes using a data augmentation technique. We also develop a tailored prior that helps in the identification of parameters and induces the matrix of untreated outcomes to be approximately low rank. Posterior draws are simulated using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler. While the proposed approach is similar to synthetic control methods and other related methods, it has several notable advantages. First, unlike synthetic control methods, the proposed approach does not require stringent assumptions. Second, in contrast to non-Bayesian approaches, the proposed method can quantify uncertainty about inferences in a straightforward and consistent manner. By means of a series of simulation studies, we show that our proposal has a better finite sample performance than that of the existing approaches.
rate research
Read More
In this paper we study methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where some units are exposed to a treatment during some periods and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the treated unit/period combinations. We propose a class of matrix completion estimators that uses the observed elements of the matrix of control outcomes corresponding to untreated unit/periods to impute the missing elements of the control outcome matrix, corresponding to treated units/periods. This leads to a matrix that well-approximates the original (incomplete) matrix, but has lower complexity according to the nuclear norm for matrices. We generalize results from the matrix completion literature by allowing the patterns of missing data to have a time series dependency structure that is common in social science applications. We present novel insights concerning the connections between the matrix completion literature, the literature on interactive fixed effects models and the literatures on program evaluation under unconfoundedness and synthetic control methods. We show that all these estimators can be viewed as focusing on the same objective function. They differ solely in the way they deal with identification, in some cases solely through regularization (our proposed nuclear norm matrix completion estimator) and in other cases primarily through imposing hard restrictions (the unconfoundedness and synthetic control approaches). The proposed method outperforms unconfoundedness-based or synthetic control estimators in simulations based on real data.
The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and testing those assumptions is important to assess the validity of causal inference. We develop model criticism for Bayesian causal inference, building on the idea of posterior predictive checks to assess model fit. Our approach involves decomposing the problem, separately criticizing the model of treatment assignments and the model of outcomes. Conditioned on the assumption of unconfoundedness---that the treatments are assigned independently of the potential outcomes---we show how to check any additional modeling assumption. Our approach provides a foundation for diagnosing model-based causal inferences.
This paper considers fixed effects estimation and inference in linear and nonlinear panel data models with random coefficients and endogenous regressors. The quantities of interest -- means, variances, and other moments of the random coefficients -- are estimated by cross sectional sample moments of GMM estimators applied separately to the time series of each individual. To deal with the incidental parameter problem introduced by the noise of the within-individual estimators in short panels, we develop bias corrections. These corrections are based on higher-order asymptotic expansions of the GMM estimators and produce improved point and interval estimates in moderately long panels. Under asymptotic sequences where the cross sectional and time series dimensions of the panel pass to infinity at the same rate, the uncorrected estimator has an asymptotic bias of the same order as the asymptotic variance. The bias corrections remove the bias without increasing variance. An empirical example on cigarette demand based on Becker, Grossman and Murphy (1994) shows significant heterogeneity in the price effect across U.S. states.
Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to posterior densities on model parameters. In this note, we review the main variants of VL approaches, that follow from considering nonlinear models of continuous and/or categorical data. En passant, we also derive a few novel theoretical results that complete the portfolio of existing analyses of variational Bayesian approaches, including investigations of their asymptotic convergence. We also suggest practical ways of extending existing VL approaches to hierarchical generative models that include (e.g., precision) hyperparameters.
We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for an unknown low-rank matrix $mathbf{X}$, given a partial and noisy observation of its entries. This quantification of uncertainty is essential for many real-world problems, including image processing, satellite imaging, and seismology, providing a principled framework for validating scientific conclusions and guiding decision-making. However, existing literature has largely focused on the completion (i.e., point estimation) of the matrix $mathbf{X}$, with little work on investigating its uncertainty. To this end, we propose in this work a new Bayesian modeling framework, called BayeSMG, which parametrizes the unknown $mathbf{X}$ via its underlying row and column subspaces. This Bayesian subspace parametrization allows for efficient posterior inference on matrix subspaces, which represents interpretable phenomena in many applications. This can then be leveraged for improved matrix recovery. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BayeSMG over existing Bayesian matrix recovery methods in numerical experiments and a seismic sensor network application.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
