GAAVI: Global Asymptotic Anytime Valid Inference for the Conditional Mean Function

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cho, Brian M, Dwivedi, Raaz, Kallus, Nathan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Cho, Brian M
Dwivedi, Raaz
Kallus, Nathan
author_facet Cho, Brian M
Dwivedi, Raaz
Kallus, Nathan
contents Inference on the conditional mean function (CMF) is central to tasks from adaptive experimentation to optimal treatment assignment and algorithmic fairness auditing. In this work, we provide a novel asymptotic anytime-valid test for a CMF global null (e.g., that all conditional means are zero) and contrasts between CMFs, enabling experimenters to make high confidence decisions at any time during the experiment beyond a minimum sample size. We provide mild conditions under which our tests achieve (i) asymptotic type-I error guarantees, (i) power one, and, unlike past tests, (iii) optimal sample complexity relative to a Gaussian location testing. By inverting our tests, we show how to construct function-valued asymptotic confidence sequences for the CMF and contrasts thereof. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show our method is well-powered across various distributions while preserving the nominal error rate under continuous monitoring.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08096
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GAAVI: Global Asymptotic Anytime Valid Inference for the Conditional Mean Function
Cho, Brian M
Dwivedi, Raaz
Kallus, Nathan
Methodology
Machine Learning
Inference on the conditional mean function (CMF) is central to tasks from adaptive experimentation to optimal treatment assignment and algorithmic fairness auditing. In this work, we provide a novel asymptotic anytime-valid test for a CMF global null (e.g., that all conditional means are zero) and contrasts between CMFs, enabling experimenters to make high confidence decisions at any time during the experiment beyond a minimum sample size. We provide mild conditions under which our tests achieve (i) asymptotic type-I error guarantees, (i) power one, and, unlike past tests, (iii) optimal sample complexity relative to a Gaussian location testing. By inverting our tests, we show how to construct function-valued asymptotic confidence sequences for the CMF and contrasts thereof. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show our method is well-powered across various distributions while preserving the nominal error rate under continuous monitoring.
title GAAVI: Global Asymptotic Anytime Valid Inference for the Conditional Mean Function
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08096