We discuss an application of Generalized Random Forests (GRF) proposed by Athey et al.(2019) to quantile regression for time series data. We extracted the theoretical results of the GRF consistency for i.i.d. data to time series data. In particular, in the main theorem, based only on the general assumptions for time series data in Davis and Nielsen (2020), and trees in Athey et al.(2019), we show that the tsQRF (time series Quantile Regression Forests) estimator is consistent. Davis and Nielsen (2020) also discussed the estimation problem using Random Forests (RF) for time series data, but the construction procedure of the RF treated by the GRF is essentially different, and different ideas are used throughout the theoretical proof. In addition, a simulation and real data analysis were conducted.In the simulation, the accuracy of the conditional quantile estimation was evaluated under time series models. In the real data using the Nikkei Stock Average, our estimator is demonstrated to be more sensitive than the others in terms of volatility, thus preventing underestimation of risk.

Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare to technology industries. Most of the work in existing literature is focused on evaluating the mean outcome of a given policy, and ignores the variability of the outcome. However, in a variety of applications, criteria other than the mean may be more sensible. For example, when the reward distribution is skewed and asymmetric, quantile-based metrics are often preferred for their robustness. In this paper, we propose a doubly-robust inference procedure for quantile OPE in sequential decision making and study its asymptotic properties. In particular, we propose utilizing state-of-the-art deep conditional generative learning methods to handle parameter-dependent nuisance function estimation. We demonstrate the advantages of this proposed estimator through both simulations and a real-world dataset from a short-video platform. In particular, we find that our proposed estimator outperforms classical OPE estimators for the mean in settings with heavy-tailed reward distributions.

Many scientific and engineering challenges-ranging from personalized medicine to customized marketing recommendations-require an understanding of treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric causal forest for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects that extends Breiman's widely used random forest algorithm. In the potential outcomes framework with unconfoundedness, we show that causal forests are pointwise consistent for the true treatment effect, and have an asymptotically Gaussian and centered sampling distribution. We also discuss a practical method for constructing asymptotic confidence intervals for the true treatment effect that are centered at the causal forest estimates. Our theoretical results rely on a generic Gaussian theory for a large family of random forest algorithms. To our knowledge, this is the first set of results that allows any type of random forest, including classification and regression forests, to be used for provably valid statistical inference. In experiments, we find causal forests to be substantially more powerful than classical methods based on nearest-neighbor matching, especially in the presence of irrelevant covariates.

了解特定待遇或政策与许多感兴趣领域有关的影响，从政治经济学，营销到医疗保健。在本文中，我们开发了一种非参数算法，用于在合成控制的背景下检测随着时间的流逝的治疗作用。该方法基于许多算法的反事实预测，而不必假设该算法正确捕获模型。我们介绍了一种推论程序来检测治疗效果，并表明测试程序对于固定，β混合过程渐近有效，而无需对所考虑的一组基础算法施加任何限制。我们讨论了平均治疗效果估计的一致性保证，并为提出的方法提供了遗憾的界限。算法类别可能包括随机森林，套索或任何其他机器学习估计器。数值研究和应用说明了该方法的优势。

我们为基于Kaplan-Meier的最近的邻居和内核存活率估计值建立了第一个非矩形误差界限，其中特征向量位于度量空间中。我们的边界意味着这些非参数估计器的强度速率，并且最多可与对数因子匹配有条件的CDF估计的现有下限。我们的证明策略还为纳尔逊 - 阿伦累积危害估计量的最近的邻居和内核变体提供了非矩形保证。我们在四个数据集上实验比较这些方法。我们发现，对于内核存活率估计量，核心的一个不错的选择是使用随机生存森林学习的。

We present a new distribution-free conformal prediction algorithm for sequential data (e.g., time series), called the \textit{sequential predictive conformal inference} (\texttt{SPCI}). We specifically account for the nature that the time series data are non-exchangeable, and thus many existing conformal prediction algorithms based on temporal residuals are not applicable. The main idea is to exploit the temporal dependence of conformity scores; thus, the past conformity scores contain information about future ones. Then we cast the problem of conformal prediction interval as predicting the quantile of a future residual, given a prediction algorithm. Theoretically, we establish asymptotic valid conditional coverage upon extending consistency analyses in quantile regression. Using simulation and real-data experiments, we demonstrate a significant reduction in interval width of \texttt{SPCI} compared to other existing methods under the desired empirical coverage.

In various fields of data science, researchers are often interested in estimating the ratio of conditional expectation functions (CEFR). Specifically in causal inference problems, it is sometimes natural to consider ratio-based treatment effects, such as odds ratios and hazard ratios, and even difference-based treatment effects are identified as CEFR in some empirically relevant settings. This chapter develops the general framework for estimation and inference on CEFR, which allows the use of flexible machine learning for infinite-dimensional nuisance parameters. In the first stage of the framework, the orthogonal signals are constructed using debiased machine learning techniques to mitigate the negative impacts of the regularization bias in the nuisance estimates on the target estimates. The signals are then combined with a novel series estimator tailored for CEFR. We derive the pointwise and uniform asymptotic results for estimation and inference on CEFR, including the validity of the Gaussian bootstrap, and provide low-level sufficient conditions to apply the proposed framework to some specific examples. We demonstrate the finite-sample performance of the series estimator constructed under the proposed framework by numerical simulations. Finally, we apply the proposed method to estimate the causal effect of the 401(k) program on household assets.

Testing the significance of a variable or group of variables $X$ for predicting a response $Y$, given additional covariates $Z$, is a ubiquitous task in statistics. A simple but common approach is to specify a linear model, and then test whether the regression coefficient for $X$ is non-zero. However, when the model is misspecified, the test may have poor power, for example when $X$ is involved in complex interactions, or lead to many false rejections. In this work we study the problem of testing the model-free null of conditional mean independence, i.e. that the conditional mean of $Y$ given $X$ and $Z$ does not depend on $X$. We propose a simple and general framework that can leverage flexible nonparametric or machine learning methods, such as additive models or random forests, to yield both robust error control and high power. The procedure involves using these methods to perform regressions, first to estimate a form of projection of $Y$ on $X$ and $Z$ using one half of the data, and then to estimate the expected conditional covariance between this projection and $Y$ on the remaining half of the data. While the approach is general, we show that a version of our procedure using spline regression achieves what we show is the minimax optimal rate in this nonparametric testing problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in terms of maintaining Type I error control, and power, compared to several existing approaches.

加权最近的邻居（WNN）估计量通常用作平均回归估计的灵活且易于实现的非参数工具。袋装技术是一种优雅的方式，可以自动生成最近邻居的重量的WNN估计器；我们将最终的估计量命名为分布最近的邻居（DNN），以便于参考。然而，这种估计器缺乏分布结果，从而将其应用于统计推断。此外，当平均回归函数具有高阶平滑度时，DNN无法达到最佳的非参数收敛率，这主要是由于偏差问题。在这项工作中，我们对DNN提供了深入的技术分析，我们建议通过线性将两个DNN估计量与不同的子采样量表进行线性相结合，从而提出了DNN估计量的偏差方法，从而导致新型的两尺度DNN（TDNN（TDNN） ）估计器。两尺度的DNN估计量具有等效的WNN表示，重量承认明确形式，有些则是负面的。我们证明，由于使用负权重，两尺度DNN估计器在四阶平滑度条件下估算回归函数时享有最佳的非参数收敛速率。我们进一步超出了估计，并确定DNN和两个规模的DNN均无渐进地正常，因为亚次采样量表和样本量差异到无穷大。对于实际实施，我们还使用二尺度DNN的Jacknife和Bootstrap技术提供方差估计器和分配估计器。可以利用这些估计器来构建有效的置信区间，以用于回归函数的非参数推断。建议的两尺度DNN方法的理论结果和吸引人的有限样本性能用几个数值示例说明了。

在本文中，我们开发了一种使用深神经网络（DNNS）的非组织和非线性时间序列的自适应非参数估计的一般理论。我们首先考虑两种类型的DNN估计量，非含糖和稀疏的DNN估计器，并为一般非平稳时间序列建立其泛化误差界限。然后，我们得出最小值下限，以估计属于一类非线性自回旋（AR）模型的平均功能，这些功能包括非线性通用添加剂AR，单个索引和阈值AR模型。在结果的基础上，我们表明稀疏的DNN估计量具有自适应性，并达到了许多非线性AR模型的最小最佳速率，直至多构型因子。通过数值模拟，我们证明了DNN方法在估计具有内在的低维结构和不连续或粗糙平均功能的非线性AR模型的有用性，这与我们的理论一致。

现代纵向研究在许多时间点收集特征数据，通常是相同的样本大小顺序。这些研究通常受到{辍学}和积极违规的影响。我们通过概括近期增量干预的效果（转换倾向分数而不是设置治疗价值）来解决这些问题，以适应多种结果和主题辍学。当条件忽略（不需要治疗阳性）时，我们给出了识别表达式的增量干预效果，并导出估计这些效果的非参数效率。然后我们提出了高效的非参数估计器，表明它们以快速参数速率收敛并产生均匀的推理保证，即使在较慢的速率下灵活估计滋扰函数。我们还研究了新型无限时间范围设置中的更传统的确定性效果的增量干预效应的方差比，其中时间点的数量可以随着样本大小而生长，并显示增量干预效果在统计精度下产生近乎指数的收益这个设置。最后，我们通过模拟得出结论，并在研究低剂量阿司匹林对妊娠结果的研究中进行了方法。

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure

我们研究马尔可夫决策过程（MDP）框架中的离线数据驱动的顺序决策问题。为了提高学习政策的概括性和适应性，我们建议通过一套关于在政策诱导的固定分配所在的分发的一套平均奖励来评估每项政策。给定由某些行为策略生成的多个轨迹的预收集数据集，我们的目标是在预先指定的策略类中学习一个强大的策略，可以最大化此集的最小值。利用半参数统计的理论，我们开发了一种统计上有效的策略学习方法，用于估算DE NED强大的最佳政策。在数据集中的总决策点方面建立了达到对数因子的速率最佳遗憾。

个性化决定规则（IDR）是一个决定函数，可根据他/她观察到的特征分配给定的治疗。文献中的大多数现有工作考虑使用二进制或有限的许多治疗方案的设置。在本文中，我们专注于连续治疗设定，并提出跳跃间隔 - 学习，开发一个最大化预期结果的个性化间隔值决定规则（I2DR）。与推荐单一治疗的IDRS不同，所提出的I2DR为每个人产生了一系列治疗方案，使其在实践中实施更加灵活。为了获得最佳I2DR，我们的跳跃间隔学习方法估计通过跳转惩罚回归给予治疗和协变量的结果的条件平均值，并基于估计的结果回归函数来衍生相应的最佳I2DR。允许回归线是用于清晰的解释或深神经网络的线性，以模拟复杂的处理 - 协调会相互作用。为了实现跳跃间隔学习，我们开发了一种基于动态编程的搜索算法，其有效计算结果回归函数。当结果回归函数是处理空间的分段或连续功能时，建立所得I2DR的统计特性。我们进一步制定了一个程序，以推断（估计）最佳政策下的平均结果。进行广泛的模拟和对华法林研究的真实数据应用，以证明所提出的I2DR的经验有效性。

We develop a general framework for distribution-free predictive inference in regression, using conformal inference. The proposed methodology allows for the construction of a prediction band for the response variable using any estimator of the regression function. The resulting prediction band preserves the consistency properties of the original estimator under standard assumptions, while guaranteeing finite-sample marginal coverage even when these assumptions do not hold. We analyze and compare, both empirically and theoretically, the two major variants of our conformal framework: full conformal inference and split conformal inference, along with a related jackknife method. These methods offer different tradeoffs between statistical accuracy (length of resulting prediction intervals) and computational efficiency. As extensions, we develop a method for constructing valid in-sample prediction intervals called rank-one-out conformal inference, which has essentially the same computational efficiency as split conformal inference. We also describe an extension of our procedures for producing prediction bands with locally varying length, in order to adapt to heteroskedascity in the data. Finally, we propose a model-free notion of variable importance, called leave-one-covariate-out or LOCO inference. Accompanying this paper is an R package conformalInference that implements all of the proposals we have introduced. In the spirit of reproducibility, all of our empirical results can also be easily (re)generated using this package.

随机森林仍然是最受欢迎的现成监督学习算法之一。尽管他们记录了良好的经验成功，但直到最近，很少有很少的理论结果来描述他们的表现和行为。在这项工作中，我们通过建立随机森林和其他受监督学习集合的融合率来推动最近的一致性和渐近正常的工作。我们培养了广义U形统计的概念，并显示在此框架内，随机森林预测可能对比以前建立的较大的子样本尺寸可能保持渐近正常。我们还提供Berry-esseen的界限，以量化这种收敛的速度，使得分列大小的角色和确定随机森林预测分布的树木的角色。

Classical asymptotic theory for statistical inference usually involves calibrating a statistic by fixing the dimension $d$ while letting the sample size $n$ increase to infinity. Recently, much effort has been dedicated towards understanding how these methods behave in high-dimensional settings, where $d$ and $n$ both increase to infinity together. This often leads to different inference procedures, depending on the assumptions about the dimensionality, leaving the practitioner in a bind: given a dataset with 100 samples in 20 dimensions, should they calibrate by assuming $n \gg d$, or $d/n \approx 0.2$? This paper considers the goal of dimension-agnostic inference; developing methods whose validity does not depend on any assumption on $d$ versus $n$. We introduce an approach that uses variational representations of existing test statistics along with sample splitting and self-normalization to produce a new test statistic with a Gaussian limiting distribution, regardless of how $d$ scales with $n$. The resulting statistic can be viewed as a careful modification of degenerate U-statistics, dropping diagonal blocks and retaining off-diagonal blocks. We exemplify our technique for some classical problems including one-sample mean and covariance testing, and show that our tests have minimax rate-optimal power against appropriate local alternatives. In most settings, our cross U-statistic matches the high-dimensional power of the corresponding (degenerate) U-statistic up to a $\sqrt{2}$ factor.

离线政策评估（OPE）被认为是强化学习（RL）的基本且具有挑战性的问题。本文重点介绍了基于从无限 - 马尔可夫决策过程的框架下从可能不同策略生成的预收集的数据的目标策略的价值估计。由RL最近开发的边际重要性采样方法和因果推理中的协变量平衡思想的动机，我们提出了一个新颖的估计器，具有大约投影的国家行动平衡权重，以进行策略价值估计。我们获得了这些权重的收敛速率，并表明拟议的值估计量在技术条件下是半参数有效的。就渐近学而言，我们的结果比例均以每个轨迹的轨迹数量和决策点的数量进行扩展。因此，当决策点数量分歧时，仍然可以使用有限的受试者实现一致性。此外，我们开发了一个必要且充分的条件，以建立贝尔曼操作员在政策环境中的适当性，这表征了OPE的困难，并且可能具有独立的利益。数值实验证明了我们提出的估计量的有希望的性能。

Integrative analysis of data from multiple sources is critical to making generalizable discoveries. Associations that are consistently observed across multiple source populations are more likely to be generalized to target populations with possible distributional shifts. In this paper, we model the heterogeneous multi-source data with multiple high-dimensional regressions and make inferences for the maximin effect (Meinshausen, B{\"u}hlmann, AoS, 43(4), 1801--1830). The maximin effect provides a measure of stable associations across multi-source data. A significant maximin effect indicates that a variable has commonly shared effects across multiple source populations, and these shared effects may be generalized to a broader set of target populations. There are challenges associated with inferring maximin effects because its point estimator can have a non-standard limiting distribution. We devise a novel sampling method to construct valid confidence intervals for maximin effects. The proposed confidence interval attains a parametric length. This sampling procedure and the related theoretical analysis are of independent interest for solving other non-standard inference problems. Using genetic data on yeast growth in multiple environments, we demonstrate that the genetic variants with significant maximin effects have generalizable effects under new environments.

合奏方法（例如随机森林）由于其高预测精度而在应用中很受欢迎。现有文献将随机的森林预测视为无限顺序不完整的U统计量，以量化其不确定性。但是，这些方法集中在每棵树的小次采样大小上，这在理论上是有效但实际上有限的。本文基于不完整的U统计数据，开发了公正的方差估计器，该估计量可以与整体样本量相当，从而使统计推断在更广泛的实际应用中成为可能。仿真结果表明，我们的估计量没有额外的计算成本，估计器的偏见和更准确的覆盖率。我们还提出了一项局部平滑过程，以减少估计器的变化，当树木数量相对较小时，该过程显示出改善的数值性能。此外，我们研究了在特定方案下提出的方差估计器的比率一致性。特别是，我们开发了一种新的“双U统计”公式，以分析估算器差异的HOFFING分解。