Tailoring Strictly Proper Scoring Rules for Downstream Tasks: An Application to Causal Inference

ArXi:2606.03332v1 Announce Type: new Probabilistic models are typically trained using task-agnostic objectives like log-loss, which can lead to significant errors in downstream estimation. This disconnect is especially critical in Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) for causal inference, where propensity score errors near $0$ and $1$ often lead to high bias and variance. We propose a principled framework for deriving task-specific strictly proper scoring rules by matching the local curvature of the downstream error metric.