Philipp Bach
@philippbach.bsky.social
310 followers 760 following 31 posts
Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) of Econometrics; FU Berlin; Interests: Causal machine learning, causality, data science, statistics, econometrics ; https://philippbach.github.io/
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Reposted by Philipp Bach
janmarcus.de
Great to see such a strong presence of @fu-berlin-vwl.bsky.social at the @vfsecon.bsky.social's Annual Conference in Cologne – always an inspiring venue for research and exchange!

@danzernatalia.bsky.social @piotrlarysz.bsky.social @philippbach.bsky.social @phaan.bsky.social @simonvoss.bsky.social
Economist of the Free University Berlin at the Annual Meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik
philippbach.bsky.social
Last day to register for our BENA Skills Camp in September in Berlin! #EconSky #EconConf #dataSkyence #CausalSky
philippbach.bsky.social
Join us for a 2 days hands-on workshop on Causal Machine Learning taking place in September at @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social

#EconSky #Causality
philippbach.bsky.social
🎉 #EconSky #EconConf
patrickkloesel.bsky.social
I really enjoyed participating in the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists' (#AERE2025) Summer Conference for the first time last week, presenting my paper on double machine learning (#DML) & electricity market decarbonization (joint work w/ Nicolas Koch & @philippbach.bsky.social)
philippbach.bsky.social
Thanks! I totally agree with @mcknaus.bsky.social. Also whenever I start some new Causal "ML" projects, the first benchmark is always OLS & logistic regression learners; it helps you to see the connection to standard approaches; not only for linear regression, but also for doubly robust etc.
mcknaus.bsky.social
One of my favorite parts is running OLS within the DoubleML package of @philippbach.bsky.social and colleagues.
Of course this is unnecessarily complicated, but instructive.
Reposted by Philipp Bach
amreibahr.bsky.social
Ich meine das mit dem Aufruf zum Wählen übrigens ernst. Laut Forsa könnten wir 28% (!) Nicht-Wähler_innen haben. Liebe Wissenschaftler_innen, liebe Wissenschaftsinstitutionen: Euch hören viele zu. Erinnert sie, wie wichtig Wählen ist. Für unsere Demokratie. & ermuntert sie, Botschaft weiterzutragen!
amreibahr.bsky.social
27 Tage bis zur vorgezogenen Bundestagswahl. Wissenschaft hat Grund zur Sorge angesichts wissenschafts-, demokratie- & menschenfeindlicher Politik. Was tun? 1️⃣ Relevanz von Demokratie & Menschenrechten betonen. 2️⃣ ALLE, die uns zuhören, auffordern, von Wahlrecht Gebrauch zu machen!⬇️ #LauteWissenschaft
#LauteWissenschaft im Wahljahr 2025: Eure Stimme zählt!
Was können wir tun gegen demokratie- und menschenfeindliche Politik, die auch auf unsere Community abzielt? Wir können — und sollten! — unsere Rolle als Multiplikator_innen nutzen und zum Wählen aufru...
arbeitinderwissenschaft.substack.com
Reposted by Philipp Bach
jlrohmann.bsky.social
We're looking to connect Berlin & Brandenburg researchers working with causal graphs from all disciplines!
➡️ "Direct" link: applied-causal-graphs.de ⬅️
⏱️ Abstracts due Feb 7th!
#CausalInference #DAGs #Berlin #CausalGraphs
⭐ Keynotes by @philippbach.bsky.social @pwgtennant.bsky.social & Simone Maxand
Flyer for 2025 Applied Causal Graphs Workshop in Berlin, to be held on March 4th, 9:00-17:30 at the Charité Virchow Klinikum. Accepting abstracts until Feb 7th, 2025. Additional information at applied-causal-graphs.de
Reposted by Philipp Bach
eurocim.bsky.social
Two days left to submit your abstract to EuroCIM 2025!

If you want the chance to present your work at the European Causal Inference Meeting 2025 in Ghent, send in your abstract no later than Jan 15, 2025.

Submission form and more information here: eurocim.org/abstracts.html
philippbach.bsky.social
The paper is joint work with (I guess almost all bsky-less)

Victor Chernozhukov
@svenklaassen.bsky.social
Martin Spindler
Jan Teichert-Kluge
Suhas Vijaykumar

Looking forward to your thoughts, comments and questions!
philippbach.bsky.social
The causal part:

If you are a #causal #DAG enthusiast, you'll finde some causal diagrams and a discussion on causal aspects of demand analysis in the paper too 😀

#CausalSky #dataSkyence
philippbach.bsky.social
The fun part (that's what you usually don't read in the papers):

Embedding text and image data makes demand analysis pretty accessible from an intuitive point of view. You can play around with the product embeddings, check for similarities and formulate/check hypotheses for various demand patterns
philippbach.bsky.social
Our learnings:

We find that text and image data play an important role in predictive and causal demand analysis: Improved demand prediction and advanced heterogeneity analysis using product infos encoded in text and images, e.g., based on similarities and AI/data-driven product categorization.
philippbach.bsky.social
Our approach:

1️⃣ Enhanced Predictions: AI-driven embeddings significantly improve the accuracy of sales rank and price predictions

2️⃣ Improved Causal Inference: By fine-tuning embeddings for causal tasks, we uncover strong heterogeneity in price elasticity linked to product-specific features
Table 5 from the referenced paper showing the predictive performance of various models used for demand analysis. Deep learning based approaches that utilize both image & text data are found to substantially better predict the quantity and price signals than traditional (linear regression with tabular features only) and ML learners (boosted trees with tabular features) A sorted-effects plot summarizing the heterogeneity in price elasticities as obtained from AI-based heterogeneity analysis (three different model specifications). More information, see Figure 7 in the linked paper.
philippbach.bsky.social
🆕 New year, new working paper: Adventures in Demand Analysis using AI 🆕

Our question: How can we advance demand analysis using recent tools from AI (Deep Learning, LLMs etc)?

Our idea: Use information from text & images in digital marketplaces like Amazon

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.00382 #EconSky
An AI-generated image showing a red and blue toy car with eyes. The figure has been obtained from summarizing a product category called "Iconic Movie-Inspired 1:55 Scale Diecast Cars Perfect for Storytelling
and Roleplay". The categorization has been obtained in the referenced paper. More details in Table 4.
philippbach.bsky.social
This looks like a pretty useful paper and - probably more importantly - a pretty useful practical procedure to find our what happens when running Causal Machine Learning. Balancing checks etc are common in traditional approaches (like PSM), but are usually mor tricky to assess in ML-based estimation
mcknaus.bsky.social
New WP 🚨

1. Recipe to write estimators as weighted outcomes
2. Double ML and causal forests as weighting estimators
3. Plug&play classic covariate balancing checks
4. Explains why Causal ML fails to find an effect of 1 with noiseless outcome Y = 1 + D
5. More fun facts
arxiv.org/abs/2411.11559
Reposted by Philipp Bach
p-hunermund.com
I'm trying to compete with @stephenjwild.bsky.social's DAG People starter pack, because economists believe in competition Open to suggestions! go.bsky.app/Fa2XSDH
Reposted by Philipp Bach
causalhuber.bsky.social
Join our team at the Econ Department of Uni Fribourg! We're hiring for a Post-doc position and a Ph.D. position in an
SNF-funded project on #NetworkScience & #Economics, led by Berno Büchel (visit berno.info). Duration: 40 months. #PostDoc #JobOpening #EconSky
philippbach.bsky.social
Regarding the Riesz representers: we have the analytical RRs implemented for the sensitivity part, but the data driven RR are still to be added. That's a bit experimental and not 100% clear how to integrate them in the package
philippbach.bsky.social
Haha thanks. We haven't planned to include it in DoubleML yet, but maybe that's a good idea. Yes we are working on the RR too, but that may still take some time. Thanks 😊
philippbach.bsky.social
In case you like to learn more about the ideas behind all these new features, join our DoubleML trainings: trainings.doubleml.org

Next training starts in March: doubleml-training-mar-2024.eventbrite.de

#EconSky
philippbach.bsky.social
3. Python API Updates:
- Added Utility Classes and Functions: docs.doubleml.org/stable/api/a...
philippbach.bsky.social
2. Multiple new examples: docs.doubleml.org/stable/examp...
- First Stage and Causal Estimation Notebook
- Basic IV Notebooks for Python and R
- GATE and CATE Notebooks für PLR
- GATE Sensitvity Notebook (for IRM or weighted average treatment effects)