No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!

Blocking is commonly used in randomized experiments to increase efficiency of estimation. A generalization of blocking removes allocations with imbalance in covariate distributions between treated and control units, and then randomizes within the remaining set of allocations with balance. This idea of rerandomization was formalized by Morgan and Rubin (Annals of Statistics, 2012, 40, 1263–1282), who suggested using Mahalanobis distance between treated and control covariate means as the criterion for removing unbalanced allocations. Kallus (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B: Statistical Methodology, 2018, 80, 85–112) proposed reducing the set of balanced allocations to the minimum. Here we discuss the implication of such an ‘optimal’ rerandomization design for inferences to the units in the sample and to the population from which the units in the sample were randomly drawn. We argue that, in general, it is a bad idea to seek the optimal design for an inference because that inference typically only reflects uncertainty from the random sampling of units, which is usually hypothetical, and not the randomization of units to treatment versus control.

No abstract uploaded!

We prove that the algebra of singular cochains on a smooth manifold, equipped with the cup product, is equivalent to the A1 structure on the Lagrangian Floer cochain group associated to the zero section in the cotangent bundle. More generally, given embeddings with isomorphic normal bundles of a closed manifold B into manifolds Q1 and Q2, we construct a differential graded category from the singular cochains of these spaces, and prove that it is equivalent to the A1 category obtained by considering exact Lagrangian embeddings of Q1 and Q2 which intersect cleanly along B.