Cross-Fitting Under Nonregularity: Normality and Inference via Locality

Bruno Fava

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Abstract: Cross-fitting is routine in much of applied research. While conventional confidence intervals that ignore cross-fold dependence are asymptotically valid in several settings, they undercover in many applications that share a common form of nonregularity: from the classic cross-validation problem of testing whether a fitted model outperforms another, to testing for heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning, to estimating the value of a potentially non-unique optimal treatment regime. Exploiting a new locality condition, I show that a large class of cross-fitting estimators still satisfies a central limit theorem despite the nonregularity, but with an asymptotic variance that must be adjusted for the cross-fold correlation. Then, I propose a method for estimating this correlation and construct new confidence intervals that attain asymptotically nominal coverage. Finally, I show that the proposed confidence intervals attain approximately nominal coverage in a simulation study with random forests and neural networks.

Date: 2026-10
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