Statistical Inference via Generative Models: Flow Matching and Causal Inference
Generative AI has achieved remarkable empirical success, but from the perspective of statistics it often remains opaque: its predictions may be accurate, yet the underlying mechanism is difficult to interpret, analyze, and trust. This book reinterprets generative AI in the language of statistics, using flow matching as a central example. The key idea is that generative models should be understood not merely as devices for producing plausible data, but as methods for the nonparametric learning of high-dimensional probability distributions. From this viewpoint, missing-data imputation becomes principled sampling from learned conditional distributions, counterfactual analysis becomes the estimation of intervention distributions, and distributional dynamics become statistically analyzable objects. Mathematically, flow matching represents distributional deformation through the continuity equation and a time-dependent velocity field, thereby extending score matching from the learning of static score fields to the learning of transport paths themselves. Building on this foundation, the book develops a statistical framework in which generative models are used to estimate nuisance components while inferential validity is maintained through orthogonalization and cross-fitting in the spirit of double/debiased machine learning. Applications to survival analysis, censoring, missingness, and causal inference show how generative models can be integrated into statistical inference for structured high-dimensional problems.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Causal InferenceSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
PO-Flow: Flow-based Generative Models for Sampling Potential Outcomes and Counterfactuals
We propose PO-Flow, a novel continuous normalizing flow (CNF) framework for causal inference that jointly models potential outcomes and counterfactuals. Trained via flow matching, PO-Flow provides a unified framework for…
Causal InferencecounterfactualImage GenerationOn Divergence Measures for Training GFlowNets
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized inference models designed to sample from unnormalized distributions over composable objects, with applications in generative modeling for tasks in fields such as causal …
Causal DiscoveryDrug DiscoveryVariational InferenceLaplacian Multi-scale Flow Matching for Generative Modeling
In this paper, we present Laplacian multiscale flow matching (LapFlow), a novel framework that enhances flow matching by leveraging multi-scale representations for image generative modeling. Our approach decomposes image…
Sample Complexity Bounds for Score-Matching: Causal Discovery and Generative Modeling
This paper provides statistical sample complexity bounds for score-matching and its applications in causal discovery. We demonstrate that accurate estimation of the score function is achievable by training a standard dee…
Causal DiscoveryCaLMFlow: Volterra Flow Matching using Causal Language Models
We introduce CaLMFlow (Causal Language Models for Flow Matching), a novel framework that casts flow matching as a Volterra integral equation (VIE), leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs) for continuous data…
Language ModelingLanguage Modelling