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Related papers: Synthetic Controls for Experimental Design

200 papers

Motivated by a recent literature on the double-descent phenomenon in machine learning, we consider highly over-parameterized models in causal inference, including synthetic control with many control units. In such models, there may be so…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-10-16 Jann Spiess , Guido Imbens , Amar Venugopal

Synthetic control (SC) methods have gained rapid popularity in economics recently, where they have been applied in the context of inferring the effects of treatments on standard continuous outcomes assuming linear input-output relations. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-19 Alicia Curth , Hoifung Poon , Aditya V. Nori , Javier González

In this paper the estimation of the distribution function for potential outcomes to receiving or not receiving a treatment is studied. The approach is based on weighting observed data on the basis on estimated propensity score. A weighted…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-04-30 Pier Luigi Conti , Livia De Giovanni

Bipartite experiments arise in various fields, in which the treatments are randomized over one set of units, while the outcomes are measured over another separate set of units. However, existing methods often rely on strong model…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-16 Sizhu Lu , Lei Shi , Yue Fang , Wenxin Zhang , Peng Ding

While much of the causal inference literature has focused on addressing internal validity biases, both internal and external validity are necessary for unbiased estimates in a target population of interest. However, few generalizability…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-07 Irina Degtiar , Tim Layton , Jacob Wallace , Sherri Rose

As an alternative to synthetic control, the distributional Synthetic Control (DSC) proposed by Gunsilius (2023) provides estimates for quantile treatment effect and thus enabling researchers to comprehensively understand the impact of…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-12 Lu Zhang , Xiaomeng Zhang , Xinyu Zhang

Researchers often turn to block randomization to increase the precision of their inference or due to practical considerations, such as in multisite trials. However, if the number of treatments under consideration is large it might not be…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-26 Taehyeon Koo , Nicole E. Pashley

Randomized experiments have become important tools in empirical research. In a completely randomized treatment-control experiment, the simple difference in means of the outcome is unbiased for the average treatment effect, and covariate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-01-01 Lihua Lei , Peng Ding

We study how to efficiently estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) using adaptive experiments. In adaptive experiments, experimenters sequentially assign treatments to experimental units while updating treatment assignment probabilities…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-21 Masahiro Kato , Takuya Ishihara , Junya Honda , Yusuke Narita

To make informed policy recommendations from observational data, we must be able to discern true treatment effects from random noise and effects due to confounding. Difference-in-Difference techniques which match treated units to control…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-12 Nicholas Illenberger , Dylan S. Small , Pamela A. Shaw

Most Bayesian response-adaptive designs unbalance randomization rates towards the most promising arms with the goal of increasing the number of positive treatment outcomes during the study, even though the primary aim of the trial is…

Applications · Statistics 2018-07-02 Steffen Ventz , Matteo Cellamare , Sergio Bacallado , Lorenzo Trippa

Group sequential designs in clinical trials allow for interim efficacy and futility monitoring. Adjustment for baseline covariates can increase power and precision of estimated effects. However, inconsistently applying covariate adjustment…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-11 Marlena S. Bannick , Sonya L. Heltshe , Noah Simon

This paper studies inference in two-stage randomized experiments under covariate-adaptive randomization. In the initial stage of this experimental design, clusters (e.g., households, schools, or graph partitions) are stratified and randomly…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-16 Jizhou Liu

Randomized experiments, or A/B testing, are the gold standard for evaluating interventions, yet they remain underutilized in inventory management. This study addresses this gap by analyzing A/B testing strategies in multi-item, multi-period…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Xinqi Chen , Xingyu Bai , Zeyu Zheng , Nian Si

This paper presents a new dynamic approach to experiment design in settings where, due to interference or other concerns, experimental units are coarse. `Region-split' experiments on online platforms are one example of such a setting. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-16 Vivek Farias , Ciamac Moallemi , Tianyi Peng , Andrew Zheng

Understanding the effect of a particular treatment or a policy pertains to many areas of interest, ranging from political economics, marketing to healthcare. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric algorithm for detecting the effects of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-24 Davide Viviano , Jelena Bradic

Synthetic control (SC) methods have been widely applied to estimate the causal effect of large-scale interventions, e.g., the state-wide effect of a change in policy. The idea of synthetic controls is to approximate one unit's…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-15 Claudia Shi , Dhanya Sridhar , Vishal Misra , David M. Blei

In panel experiments, we randomly assign units to different interventions, measuring their outcomes, and repeating the procedure in several periods. Using the potential outcomes framework, we define finite population dynamic causal effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-28 Iavor Bojinov , Ashesh Rambachan , Neil Shephard

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 traces the strong relations between experimental design and control, such as the use of optimal inputs to obtain precise parameter estimation in dynamical systems and the introduction of suitably designed perturbations in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-03-03 Luc Pronzato