Peer effects are difficult to estimate when interaction graphs evolve because pre-assignment network history, dynamic peer exposure, and post-assignment network change have distinct causal roles. We introduce a controlled contrast framework that indexes potential outcomes by own treatment, temporally aggregated peer exposure, and a post-assignment evolution summary. Differences between the resulting means define own-treatment, peer-exposure, controlled network-evolution, and joint controlled contrasts rather than a mediation decomposition. We develop the Dynamic Network Doubly Robust estimator, DynaNet-DR, which combines a temporally factorized propensity with normalized augmentation. Under consistency, summary sufficiency, sequential exchangeability, positivity, nuisance convergence, and weak dependence, its canonical estimator is consistent when either the outcome regression or the propensity estimator is consistent. The reported implementation adds representative-score prediction, fixed clipping, and finite-sample stabilization. Semi-synthetic benchmarks on fixed real temporal graph sequences show favorable estimation accuracy among methods targeting the full profile. These benchmarks assess summary-indexed contrasts rather than counterfactual edge generation, and the MathOverflow study is an observational illustration under the stated assumptions.
Robert Lunde, Minjie Yang, Elizaveta Levina +1math.ST stat.ME stat.ML
We develop a framework for conformal prediction in dyadic regression problems under complex missingness mechanisms. At the theoretical level, we establish super-uniformity of conformal prediction under distributional invariance conditions weaker than exchangeability. A key result handles the case where the sample itself is a random subset of the index set, a setting not covered by existing theory, via a novel bijection argument that constructs an explicit measure-preserving correspondence between events. In addition, we propose conformal prediction procedures for jointly exchangeable arrays, including full conformal, split conformal, a row-column approach exploiting similarities within rows and columns, and a selective conformal procedure achieving mask-conditional validity. For missing elements, we establish asymptotic validity of a graphon-weighted conformal procedure under a nonparametric graphon model for the missingness mechanism. We further establish conditional validity results for both continuous and discrete responses; to the best of our knowledge, this is first formal proof of asymptotic conditional validity for weighted conformal prediction under a missing-not-at-random assumption. The proposed methods are illustrated on synthetic and real network data.