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 heterogeneous treatment effect


A Non-parametric Direct Learning Approach to Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation under Unmeasured Confounding

Neural Information Processing Systems

In various domains, different subjects may exhibit different responses to the same set of treatments. The exploration of this heterogeneity in the effects resulting from exposure has gained substantial interest in recent years. For instance, inferring the heterogeneous effect of a medical treatment on clinical outcome can contribute to the development of personalized treatment (Cai et al., 2011). A similar concept has found application in personalized marketing as well (Chandra et al., 2022).



Debiased Bayesian inference for average treatment effects

Kolyan Ray, Botond Szabo

Neural Information Processing Systems

Workinginthestandard potential outcomes framework, we propose a data-driven modification to an arbitrary (nonparametric) prior based on the propensity score that corrects for the first-orderposteriorbias,therebyimprovingperformance.Weillustrateourmethod for Gaussian process (GP) priors using (semi-)synthetic data.






causalfe: Causal Forests with Fixed Effects in Python

Aytug, Harry

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The causalfe package provides a Python implementation of Causal Forests with Fixed Effects (CFFE) for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects in panel data settings. Standard causal forest methods struggle with panel data because unit and time fixed effects induce spurious heterogeneity in treatment effect estimates. The CFFE approach addresses this by performing node-level residualization during tree construction, removing fixed effects within each candidate split rather than globally. This paper describes the methodology, documents the software interface, and demonstrates the package through simulation studies that validate the estimator's performance under various data generating processes.


Machine Learning Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Instruments

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects with arbitrary machine learning methods in the presence of unobserved confounders with the aid of a valid instrument. Such settings arise in A/B tests with an intent-to-treat structure, where the experimenter randomizes over which user will receive a recommendation to take an action, and we are interested in the effect of the downstream action. We develop a statistical learning approach to the estimation of heterogeneous effects, reducing the problem to the minimization of an appropriate loss function that depends on a set of auxiliary models (each corresponding to a separate prediction task). The reduction enables the use of all recent algorithmic advances (e.g.


Minimax Optimal Nonparametric Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

Neural Information Processing Systems

A central goal of causal inference is to detect and estimate the treatment effects of a given treatment or intervention on an outcome variable of interest, where a member known as the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) is of growing popularity in recent practical applications such as the personalized medicine. In this paper, we model the HTE as a smooth nonparametric difference between two less smooth baseline functions, and determine the tight statistical limits of the nonparametric HTE estimation as a function of the covariate geometry. In particular, a two-stage nearest-neighbor-based estimator throwing away observations with poor matching quality is near minimax optimal. We also establish the tight dependence on the density ratio without the usual assumption that the covariate densities are bounded away from zero, where a key step is to employ a novel maximal inequality which could be of independent interest.