Economics

Classical Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), or A/B tests, are designed to draw causal inferences about a population of units, for example, individuals, plots of land or visits to a website. A key assumption underlying a standard RCT is the absence of interactions between units, or the stable unit treatment value assumption (Ann. Statist. 6 (1978) 34-58). Modem experimentation, however, is often conducted

In order to identify expertise, forecasters should not be tested by their calibration score, which can always be made arbitrarily small, but rather by their Brier score. The Brier score is the sum of the calibration score and the refinement score; the latter measures how good the sorting into bins with the same forecast is, and thus attests to “expertise.” This raises the question of whether one can gain

In order to improve prices at Amazon, we created Pricing Labs, a price experimentation platform. Since we do not price discriminate, we must run product-randomized experiments. We discuss how we randomize to prevent spillovers, run different experimental designs (i.e., crossovers) to improve precision, and control for demand trends and differences in treatment groups to get more precise treatment effect

We propose a novel architecture for time series models built upon state-space methods. We jointly estimate many, potentially multivariate, distributions defined using state-space models by partially pooling their parameters across the cross-section. These joint distributions define a novel recurrent neural network. By combining state-space methods and neural networks, we leverage the interpretability of

The fundamental challenge of drawing causal inference is that counterfactual outcomes are not fully observed for any unit. Furthermore, in observational studies, treatment assignment is likely to be confounded. Many statistical methods have emerged for causal inference under unconfoundedness conditions given pre-treatment covariates, including: propensity score-based methods, prognostic score-based methods