Paper List
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The Effective Reproduction Number in the Kermack-McKendrick model with age of infection and reinfection
This paper addresses the challenge of accurately estimating the time-varying effective reproduction number ℛ(t) in epidemics by incorporating two crit...
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Covering Relations in the Poset of Combinatorial Neural Codes
This work addresses the core challenge of navigating the complex poset structure of neural codes to systematically test the conjecture linking convex ...
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Collective adsorption of pheromones at the water-air interface
This paper addresses the core challenge of understanding how amphiphilic pheromones, previously assumed to be transported in the gas phase, can be sta...
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pHapCompass: Probabilistic Assembly and Uncertainty Quantification of Polyploid Haplotype Phase
This paper addresses the core challenge of accurately assembling polyploid haplotypes from sequencing data, where read assignment ambiguity and an exp...
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Setting up for failure: automatic discovery of the neural mechanisms of cognitive errors
This paper addresses the core challenge of automating the discovery of biologically plausible recurrent neural network (RNN) dynamics that can replica...
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Influence of Object Affordance on Action Language Understanding: Evidence from Dynamic Causal Modeling Analysis
This study addresses the core challenge of moving beyond correlational evidence to establish the *causal direction* and *temporal dynamics* of how obj...
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Revealing stimulus-dependent dynamics through statistical complexity
This paper addresses the core challenge of detecting stimulus-specific patterns in neural population dynamics that remain hidden to traditional variab...
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Exactly Solvable Population Model with Square-Root Growth Noise and Cell-Size Regulation
This paper addresses the fundamental gap in understanding how microscopic growth fluctuations, specifically those with size-dependent (square-root) no...
Realizing Common Random Numbers: Event-Keyed Hashing for Causally Valid Stochastic Models
Institute for Disease Modeling, Gates Foundation | Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina | Institute for Disease Modeling, Gates Foundation
30秒速读
IN SHORT: This paper addresses the critical problem that standard stateful PRNG implementations in agent-based models violate causal validity by making random draws execution-path-dependent, thereby breaking the fundamental assumption of common random numbers needed for valid counterfactual comparisons.
核心创新
- Methodology Identifies and formalizes the fundamental mismatch between scientific causal structure in ABMs and program-level causal structure induced by stateful PRNGs through the lens of Structural Causal Models (SCMs)
- Methodology Introduces the concept of 'execution invariance' as a necessary property for causally valid ABM counterfactuals, requiring that exogenous noise terms remain stable across intervention scenarios
- Methodology Proposes event-keyed random number generation combining counter-based PRNGs (Philox/Threefry) with event identifiers to decouple random draws from simulation execution order
主要结论
- Standard stateful PRNG practices violate the execution invariance required for valid SCM-style interventions, as demonstrated through formal analysis of the structural causal model framework
- Event-keyed hashing with counter-based PRNGs restores the stable event-indexed exogenous structure assumed by SCMs, enabling proper counterfactual comparisons with variance reduction benefits
- The proposed approach allows ABMs to function as valid structural causal models under interventions, maintaining the critical property that interventions change only structural equations while holding exogenous noise terms fixed
摘要: Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used to estimate causal treatment effects via paired counterfactual simulation. A standard variance reduction technique is common random numbers (CRNs), which couples replicates across intervention scenarios by sharing the same random inputs. In practice, CRNs are implemented by reusing the same base seed, but this relies on a critical assumption: that the same draw index corresponds to the same modeled event across scenarios. Stateful pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) violate this assumption whenever interventions alter the simulation's execution path, because any change in control flow shifts the draw index used for all downstream events. We argue that this execution-path-dependent draw indexing is not only a variance-reduction nuisance, but represents a fundamental mismatch between the scientific causal structure ABMs are intended to encode and the program-level causal structure induced by stateful PRNG implementations. Formalizing this through the lens of structural causal models (SCMs), we show that standard PRNG practices yield causally incoherent paired counterfactual comparisons even when the mechanistic specification is otherwise sound. We show that a remedy is to combine counter-based random number generators (e.g., Philox/Threefry) with event identifiers. This decouples random number generation from simulation execution order by making random draws explicit functions of the particular modeled event that called them, restoring the stable event-indexed exogenous structure assumed by SCMs.