Research

Structural Regularization

(with Zhesheng Zheng)

arXiv preprint, 2020

Paper | Slides

We propose a novel method for modeling data by using structural models based on economic theory as regularizers for statistical models. We show that even if a structural model is misspecified, as long as it is informative about the data-generating mechanism, our method can outperform both the (misspecified) structural model and un-structural-regularized statistical models. Our method permits a Bayesian interpretation of theory as prior knowledge and can be used both for statistical prediction and causal inference. It contributes to transfer learning by showing how incorporating theory into statistical modeling can significantly improve out-of-domain predictions and offers a way to synthesize reduced-form and structural approaches for causal effect estimation.

Ensemble Learning with Statistical and Structural Models

(with Jingzhi Xu)

arXiv preprint, 2020

Paper | Slides

We propose a set of novel methods for combining statistical and structural models for improved prediction and causal inference. Our first proposed estimator has the doubly robustness property in that it only requires the correct specification of either the statistical or the structural model. Our second proposed estimator is a weighted ensemble that has the ability to outperform both models when they are both misspecified.