{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/conditional-inference-towards-a-hierarchy-of","title":"Tailored inference for finite populations: conditional validity and transfer across distributions","arxiv_id":"2104.04565","date":"2021-04-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ying Jin","Dominik Rothenhäusler"],"abstract":"Parameters of sub-populations can be more relevant than super-population ones. For example, a healthcare provider may be interested in the effect of a treatment plan for a specific subset of their patients; policymakers may be concerned with the impact of a policy in a particular state within a given population. In these cases, the focus is on a specific finite population, as opposed to an infinite super-population. Such a population can be characterized by fixing some attributes that are intrinsic to them, leaving unexplained variations like measurement error as random. Inference for a population with fixed attributes can then be modeled as inferring parameters of a conditional distribution. Accordingly, it is desirable that confidence intervals are conditionally valid for the realized population, instead of marginalizing over many possible draws of populations. We provide a statistical inference framework for parameters of finite populations with known attributes. Leveraging the attribute information, our estimators and confidence intervals closely target a specific finite population. When the data is from the population of interest, our confidence intervals attain asymptotic conditional validity given the attributes, and are shorter than those for super-population inference. In addition, we develop procedures to infer parameters of new populations with differing covariate distributions; the confidence intervals are also conditionally valid for the new populations under mild conditions. Our methods extend to situations where the fixed information has a weaker structure or is only partially observed. We demonstrate the validity and applicability of our methods using simulated and real-world data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.04565v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.04565v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"conditional-inference-towards-a-hierarchy-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/ying531/condinf","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"conditional-inference-towards-a-hierarchy-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/ying531/transinf","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2104.04565","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}