Conditional Outcome Equivalence: A Quantile Alternative to CATE

The conditional quantile treatment effect (CQTE) can provide insight into the effect of a treatment beyond the conditional average treatment effect (CA TE). This ability to provide information over multiple quantiles of the response makes the CQTE especially valuable in cases where the effect of a treatment is not well-modelled by a location shift, even conditionally on the covariates. Nevertheless, the estimation of the CQTE is challenging and often depends upon the smoothness of the individual quantiles as a function of the covariates rather than smoothness of the CQTE itself. This is in stark contrast to the CA TE where it is possible to obtain high-quality estimates which have less dependency upon the smoothness of the nuisance parameters when the CA TE itself is smooth. Moreover, relative smoothness of the CQTE lacks the interpretability of smoothness of the CA TE making it less clear whether it is a reasonable assumption to make.