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Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects is critical in domains such as personalized medicine, resource allocation, and policy evaluation. A central challenge lies in identifying subpopulations that respond differently to interventions,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-18 Zilong Wang , Turgay Ayer , Shihao Yang

We propose the orthogonal random forest, an algorithm that combines Neyman-orthogonality to reduce sensitivity with respect to estimation error of nuisance parameters with generalized random forests (Athey et al., 2017)--a flexible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Miruna Oprescu , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Machine learning methods for estimating treatment effect heterogeneity promise greater flexibility than existing methods that test a few pre-specified hypotheses. However, one problem these methods can have is that it can be challenging to…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-08-05 Patrick Rehill

Ensembles of decision trees are a useful tool for obtaining for obtaining flexible estimates of regression functions. Examples of these methods include gradient boosted decision trees, random forests, and Bayesian CART. Two potential…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-09-18 Antonio Ricardo Linero , Yun Yang

Causal inference using observational text data is becoming increasingly popular in many research areas. This paper presents the Bayesian Topic Regression (BTR) model that uses both text and numerical information to model an outcome…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-14 Maximilian Ahrens , Julian Ashwin , Jan-Peter Calliess , Vu Nguyen

Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals, and can show poor predictive performance in the presence of strong, smooth effects. Taking the perspective of random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-08 Rina Friedberg , Julie Tibshirani , Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

This paper introduces aggregate Bayesian Causal Forests (aBCF), a new Bayesian model for causal inference using aggregated data. Aggregated data are common in policy evaluations where we observe individuals such as students, but…

In the fight against hard-to-treat diseases such as cancer, it is often difficult to discover new treatments that benefit all subjects. For regulatory agency approval, it is more practical to identify subgroups of subjects for whom the…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-10-09 Wei-Yin Loh , Xu He , Michael Man

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in combining causal information, commonly represented using causal graphs, with machine learning models. Probability trees provide a simple yet powerful alternative representation of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Tue Herlau

Standard causal inference characterizes treatment effect through averages, but the counterfactual distributions could be different in not only the central tendency but also spread and shape. To provide a comprehensive evaluation of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-04 Steven G. Xu , Shu Yang , Brian J. Reich

Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is an active area of research. Most of the existing methods, however, focus on estimating the conditional average treatment effects of a single, binary treatment given a set of pre-treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-30 Max Goplerud , Kosuke Imai , Nicole E. Pashley

Flexible machine learning tools are increasingly used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. This paper gives an accessible tutorial demonstrating the use of the causal forest algorithm, available in the R package grf. We start with a…

Applications · Statistics 2024-12-17 Erik Sverdrup , Maria Petukhova , Stefan Wager

Measuring treatment effects in observational studies is challenging because of confounding bias. Confounding occurs when a variable affects both the treatment and the outcome. Traditional methods such as propensity score matching estimate…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-23 Bevan I. Smith , Charles Chimedza

The identification of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) across subgroups is of significant interest in clinical trial analysis. Several state-of-the-art HTE estimation methods, including causal forests, apply recursive partitioning for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-10 Vik Shirvaikar , Andrea Storås , Xi Lin , Chris Holmes

Methods utilizing instrumental variables have been a fundamental statistical approach to estimation in the presence of unmeasured confounding, usually occurring in non-randomized observational data common to fields such as economics and…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-06 Charles Spanbauer , Wei Pan

Randomized trials and observational studies, more often than not, run over a certain period of time. The treatment effect evolves during this period which provides crucial insights into the treatment response and the long-term effects. Many…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-04-13 Shu Li , Peter Bühlmann

Understanding and inferencing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (HTE) and Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) are vital for developing personalized treatment recommendations. Many state-of-the-art approaches achieve inspiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Chan Hsu , Jun-Ting Wu , Yihuang Kang

We present a general framework for Bayesian inference of causal effects that delivers provably robust inferences founded on design-based randomization of treatments. The framework involves fixing the observed potential outcomes and forming…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Easton Huch , Fred Feinberg , Walter Dempsey

This paper investigates the use of regularization priors in the context of treatment effect estimation using observational data where the number of control variables is large relative to the number of observations. First, the phenomenon of…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-30 P. Richard Hahn , Carlos M. Carvalho , Jingyu He , David Puelz

Identifying heterogeneity in a population's response to a health or policy intervention is crucial for evaluating and informing policy decisions. We propose a novel heterogeneous treatment effect estimator in the difference-in-differences…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-24 Xinkun Nie , Chen Lu , Stefan Wager