Robust Recursive Partitioning for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Uncertainty Quantification

Subgroup analysis of treatment effects plays an important role in applications from medicine to public policy to recommender systems. It allows physicians (for example) to identify groups of patients for whom a given drug or treatment is likely to be effective and groups of patients for which it is not. Most of the current methods of subgroup analysis begin with a particular algorithm for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) and identify subgroups by maximizing the difference across subgroups of the average treatment effect in each subgroup. These approaches have several weaknesses: they rely on a particular algorithm for estimating ITE, they ignore (in)homogeneity within identified subgroups, and they do not produce good confidence estimates. This paper develops a new method for subgroup analysis, R2P, that addresses all these weaknesses.