Lars van der Laan

University of Washington, Seattle. Department of Statistics

prof_pic1.jpg

B313

Padelford Hall, Northeast Stevens Way

Seattle, WA 98103

lvdlaan@uw.edu

About me

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Statistics at the University of Washington, advised by Marco Carone and Alex Luedtke.

My research focuses on causal inference, statistical learning, and semiparametric efficiency theory. I develop methods for debiased and efficient estimation with modern machine learning, including doubly robust inference, automatic debiasing, inference after model selection, and heterogeneous treatment effects.

I am supported by a Netflix Graduate Research Fellowship, collaborating with Nathan Kallus and Aurélien Bibaut on reinforcement learning and dynamic decision making (paper) and nonparametric instrumental variables inference (paper). This work tackles challenges such as estimating long-term causal effects from short-term experiments.

Another line of research connects calibration with causal inference, including causal isotonic calibration for CATE predictors, stabilized weighting, Bellman calibration for reinforcement learning, and doubly robust inference via calibration.

I also study machine learning methods for predictive inference, such as conformal prediction and generalized Venn–Abers calibration (with Ahmed Alaa, UC Berkeley).

Beyond methodology, I apply these ideas in biomedical and technology domains through internships at Genentech, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, and Netflix. I also contribute to the tlverse open-source software ecosystem and consult for TLRevolution.

selected publications

2025

  1. Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Inference with Many Weak Instruments
    Lars van der Laan, Nathan Kallus, and Aurélien Bibaut
    2025
  2. Automatic Debiased Machine Learning for Smooth Functionals of Nonparametric M-Estimands
    Lars van der Laan, Aurelien Bibaut, Nathan Kallus, and 1 more author
    2025
  3. Semiparametric Double Reinforcement Learning with Applications to Long-Term Causal Inference
    Lars van der Laan, David Hubbard, Allen Tran, and 2 more authors
    2025
  4. Stabilized Inverse Probability Weighting via Isotonic Calibration
    Lars van der Laan, Ziming Lin, Marco Carone, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR), 2025
    To appear

2024

  1. Doubly robust inference via calibration
    Lars van der Laan, Alex Luedtke, and Marco Carone
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.02771, 2024
  2. Self-Calibrating Conformal Prediction
    Lars van der Laan, and Ahmed M. Alaa
    The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
  3. Combining T-learning and DR-learning: a framework for oracle-efficient estimation of causal contrasts
    Lars van der Laan, Marco Carone, and Alex Luedtke
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.01972, 2024

2023

  1. Causal isotonic calibration for heterogeneous treatment effects
    Lars van der Laan, Ernesto Ulloa-Pérez, Marco Carone, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023