Constructing Confidence Intervals for Infinite-Dimensional Functional Prameters by Highly Adaptive Lasso

Abstract: Estimating the conditional mean function is a central task in statistical learning. In this paper, we consider estimation and inference for a nonparametric class of real-valued c`adl`ag functions with bounded sectional variation (Gill et al., 1995), using the Highly Adaptive Lasso (HAL) (van der Laan, 2015; Benkeser and van der Laan, 2016; van der Laan, 2023), a flexible empirical risk minimizer over linear combinations of tensor products of zero- or higher-order spline basis functions under an L1 norm constraint. Building on recent theoretical advances in asymptotic normality and uniform convergence rates for higher-order spline HAL estimators (van der Laan, 2023), this work focuses on constructing robust confidence intervals for HAL-based conditional mean estimators. To address regularization bias, we propose a targeted HAL with a debiasing step to remove bias for the conditional mean, and also consider a relaxed HAL estimator to reduce bias. We also introduce both global and local undersmoothing strategies to adaptively select the working model, reducing bias relative to variance. Combined with delta-method-based variance estimation, we construct confidence intervals for conditional means based on HAL. Through simulations, we evaluate combinations of estimation and model selection strategies, showing that our methods substantially reduce bias and yield confidence intervals with coverage rates close to nominal levels across scenarios. We also provide recommendations for different estimation objectives and illustrate the generality of our framework by applying it to estimate conditional average treatment effect (CATE) functions, highlighting how HAL-based inference extends to other infinite-dimensional, non-pathwise differentiable parameters.