Ensemble Learning with Statistical and Structural Models
This work addresses the challenge of model misspecification in data analysis for researchers and practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ensemble methods.
The paper tackled the problem of combining statistical and structural models for prediction and causal inference, proposing estimators that achieve doubly robustness and outperform both models when misspecified, with experiments showing potential in settings like auctions and demand estimation.
Statistical and structural modeling represent two distinct approaches to data analysis. In this paper, 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. Experiments demonstrate the potential of our estimators in various settings, including fist-price auctions, dynamic models of entry and exit, and demand estimation with instrumental variables.