English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Learning with Rare Outcomes

200 papers

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-08 Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

Inferring the heterogeneous treatment effect is a fundamental problem in the sciences and commercial applications. In this paper, we focus on estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE), that is, the difference in the conditional…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-23 Haomiao Meng , Xingye Qiao

This paper develops a performant Bayesian approach to conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation in regression discontinuity designs (RDD), an increasingly prevalent form of quasi-experiment that facilitates causal inference.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-18 Rafael Alcantara , P. Richard Hahn , Hedibert F. Lopes

One of the key challenges when developing a predictive model is the capability to describe the domain knowledge and the cause-effect relationships in a simple way. Decision rules are a useful and important methodology in this context,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Francisco Valente , Jorge Henriques , Simão Paredes , Teresa Rocha , Paulo de Carvalho , João Morais

Policy learning can be used to extract individualized treatment regimes from observational data in healthcare, civics, e-commerce, and beyond. One big hurdle to policy learning is a commonplace lack of overlap in the data for different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-04 Nathan Kallus

Causal machine learning (ML) offers flexible, data-driven methods for predicting treatment outcomes including efficacy and toxicity, thereby supporting the assessment and safety of drugs. A key benefit of causal ML is that it allows for…

The proliferation of data has sparked significant interest in leveraging findings from one study to estimate treatment effects in a different target population without direct outcome observations. However, the transfer learning process is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-15 Seok-Jin Kim , Hongjie Liu , Molei Liu , Kaizheng Wang

Building models of human decision-making from observed behaviour is critical to better understand, diagnose and support real-world policies such as clinical care. As established policy learning approaches remain focused on imitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Alizée Pace , Alex J. Chan , Mihaela van der Schaar

Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Jinxiong Zhang

The paper proposes an estimator to make inference of heterogeneous treatment effects sorted by impact groups (GATES) for non-randomised experiments. The groups can be understood as a broader aggregation of the conditional average treatment…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-03-30 Daniel Jacob

State-level policy studies often conduct heterogeneity analyses that quantify how treatment effects vary across state characteristics. These analyses may be used to inform state-specific policy decisions, or to infer how the effect of a…

Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are increasingly estimated from observational data and used to guide policy and individualized treatment decisions. Before such estimates can be trusted in practice, their predictive fitness…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-21 Bosen Cui , Yuhong Yang

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects is important to tailor treatments to those individuals who would most likely benefit. However, conditional average treatment effect predictors may often be trained on one population but possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Christoph Kern , Michael Kim , Angela Zhou

Many social programs attempt to allocate scarce resources to people with the greatest need. Indeed, public services increasingly use algorithmic risk assessments motivated by this goal. However, targeting the highest-need recipients often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Bryan Wilder , Pim Welle

We study the problem of model selection in causal inference, specifically for conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. Unlike machine learning, there is no perfect analogue of cross-validation for model selection as we do not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Divyat Mahajan , Ioannis Mitliagkas , Brady Neal , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We propose an approach for learning optimal tree-based prescription policies directly from data, combining methods for counterfactual estimation from the causal inference literature with recent advances in training globally-optimal decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Maxime Amram , Jack Dunn , Ying Daisy Zhuo

In recent years, precision treatment strategy have gained significant attention in medical research, particularly for patient care. We propose a novel framework for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) in time-to-event…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-29 Runjia Li , Victor B. Talisa , Chung-Chou H. Chang

Automated decision-making (ADM) systems are being deployed across a diverse range of critical problem areas such as social welfare and healthcare. Recent work highlights the importance of causal ML models in ADM systems, but implementing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Unai Fischer-Abaigar , Christoph Kern , Frauke Kreuter

The estimation of Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) is crucial for understanding the heterogeneity of treatment effects in clinical trials. We evaluate the performance of common methods, including causal forests and various…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-12 Oshri Machluf , Tzviel Frostig , Gal Shoham , Tomer Milo , Elad Berkman , Raviv Pryluk

Researchers and practitioners often wish to measure treatment effects in settings where units interact via markets and recommendation systems. In these settings, units are affected by certain shared states, like prices, algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Chris Hays , Manish Raghavan