English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Analysis using Synthetic Controls in Contin…

200 papers

Social scientists often study how a policy reform impacted a single targeted country. Increasingly, this is done with the synthetic control method (SCM). SCM models the country's counterfactual (non-reform or untreated) trajectory as a…

Applications · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elias Tuomaala

Uncertainty quantification is a fundamental problem in the analysis and interpretation of synthetic control (SC) methods. We develop conditional prediction intervals in the SC framework, and provide conditions under which these intervals…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-09 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Rocio Titiunik

Synthetic control methods often rely on matching pre-treatment characteristics (called predictors) of the treated unit. The choice of predictors and how they are weighted plays a key role in the performance and interpretability of synthetic…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-02 Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

In this article we propose a set of simple principles to guide empirical practice in synthetic control studies. The proposed principles follow from formal properties of synthetic control estimators, and pertain to the nature, implications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-15 Alberto Abadie , Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

Counterfactual explanations are increasingly proposed as interpretable mechanisms to achieve algorithmic recourse. However, current counterfactual techniques for time series classification are predominantly designed with static data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Emmanuel C. Chukwu , Rianne M. Schouten , Monique Tabak , Mykola Pechenizkiy

Synthetic control methods (SCMs) are a canonical approach used to estimate treatment effects from panel data in the internet economy. We shed light on a frequently overlooked but ubiquitous assumption made in SCMs of "overlap": a treated…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-26 Daniel Ngo , Keegan Harris , Anish Agarwal , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

This paper notes a simple connection between synthetic control and online learning. Specifically, we recognize synthetic control as an instance of Follow-The-Leader (FTL). Standard results in online convex optimization then imply that, even…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-03-16 Jiafeng Chen

Counterfactual thinking is a crucial yet challenging topic for artificial intelligence to learn knowledge from data and ultimately improve performance for new scenarios. Many research works, including the Potential Outcome Model (POM) and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Mingyu Kang , Duxin Chen , Ziyuan Pu , Jianxi Gao , Wenwu Yu

This paper addresses data-driven control of continuous-time systems. We develop a framework based on synthesis operators associated with input and state trajectories. A key advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-27 Masashi Wakaiki

Counterfactual estimation over time is important in various applications, such as personalized medicine. However, time-dependent confounding bias in observational data still poses a significant challenge in achieving accurate and efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Nghia D. Nguyen , Pablo Robles-Granda , Lav R. Varshney

Lewis' theory of counterfactuals is the foundation of many contemporary notions of causality. In this paper, we extend this theory in the temporal direction to enable symbolic counterfactual reasoning on infinite sequences, such as…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Bernd Finkbeiner , Julian Siber

Synthetic control methods are widely used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in time-series settings. A common approach to estimate synthetic control weights is to regress the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-06 Chan Park , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

The synthetic control method (SCM) is widely used for constructing the counterfactual of a treated unit based on data from control units in a donor pool. Allowing the donor pool contains more control units than time periods, we propose a…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-19 Chengwang Liao , Zhentao Shi , Yapeng Zheng

To infer the treatment effect for a single treated unit using panel data, synthetic control methods construct a linear combination of control units' outcomes that mimics the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome trajectory. This linear…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-07 Hongxiang Qiu , Xu Shi , Wang Miao , Edgar Dobriban , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

This paper discusses a practical approach that combines synthetic control with triple difference to address violations of the parallel trends assumption. By transforming triple difference into a DID structure, we can apply synthetic control…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-09-24 Castiel Chen Zhuang

Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from observational data is relevant for many applications (e.g., personalized medicine). Yet, state-of-the-art methods build upon simple long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, thus rendering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Valentyn Melnychuk , Dennis Frauen , Stefan Feuerriegel

Estimating the counterfactual outcome of treatment is essential for decision-making in public health and clinical science, among others. Often, treatments are administered in a sequential, time-varying manner, leading to an exponentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-16 Shenghao Wu , Wenbin Zhou , Minshuo Chen , Shixiang Zhu

We present a new estimator for causal effects with panel data that builds on insights behind the widely used difference in differences and synthetic control methods. Relative to these methods we find, both theoretically and empirically,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-22 Dmitry Arkhangelsky , Susan Athey , David A. Hirshberg , Guido W. Imbens , Stefan Wager

Counterfactual explanations are a prominent example of post-hoc interpretability methods in the explainable Artificial Intelligence research domain. They provide individuals with alternative scenarios and a set of recommendations to achieve…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Andrea Ferrario , Michele Loi

Methods to find counterfactual explanations have predominantly focused on one step decision making processes. In this work, we initiate the development of methods to find counterfactual explanations for decision making processes in which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Stratis Tsirtsis , Abir De , Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez