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Related papers: How Balanced Should Causal Covariates Be?

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The ability to generalize experimental results from randomized control trials (RCTs) across locations is crucial for informing policy decisions in targeted regions. Such generalization is often hindered by the lack of identifiability due to…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-12-10 Xinkun Nie , Guido Imbens , Stefan Wager

Rerandomization is a modern experimental design technique that repeatedly randomizes treatment assignments until covariates are deemed balanced between treatment groups. This enhances the precision and coherence of causal effect estimators,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-08 Antônio Carlos Herling Ribeiro Junior , Zach Branson

Positivity violations, which occur when some subgroups either always or never receive a treatment of interest, pose significant challenges for causal effect estimation with observational data. Recent balancing weight methods have proved to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-17 Martha Barnard , Jared D. Huling , Julian Wolfson

Accurate estimates of causal effects play a key role in decision-making across applications such as healthcare, economics, and operations. In the absence of randomized experiments, a common approach to estimating causal effects uses…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-14 Davin Choo , Chandler Squires , Arnab Bhattacharyya , David Sontag

Scholars frequently use covariate balance tests to test the validity of natural experiments and related designs. Unfortunately, when measured covariates are unrelated to potential outcomes, balance is uninformative about key identification…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-15 Clara Bicalho , Adam Bouyamourn , Thad Dunning

In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-02 Martin Cousineau , Vedat Verter , Susan A. Murphy , Joelle Pineau

An important challenge facing modern machine learning is how to rigorously quantify the uncertainty of model predictions. Conveying uncertainty is especially important when there are changes to the underlying data distribution that might…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Sangdon Park , Edgar Dobriban , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani

Matching on covariates is a well-established framework for estimating causal effects in observational studies. The principal challenge stems from the often high-dimensional structure of the problem. Many methods have been introduced to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-12 Florian Gunsilius , Yuliang Xu

A key to causal inference with observational data is achieving balance in predictive features associated with each treatment type. Recent literature has explored representation learning to achieve this goal. In this work, we discuss the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-25 Serge Assaad , Shuxi Zeng , Chenyang Tao , Shounak Datta , Nikhil Mehta , Ricardo Henao , Fan Li , Lawrence Carin

Although complete randomization ensures covariate balance on average, the chance for observing significant differences between treatment and control covariate distributions increases with many covariates. Rerandomization discards…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-15 Xinran Li , Peng Ding , Donald B. Rubin

Background: It has long been advised to account for baseline covariates in the analysis of confirmatory randomised trials, with the main statistical justifications being that this increases power and, when a randomisation scheme balanced…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-09 Tim P. Morris , A. Sarah Walker , Elizabeth J. Williamson , Ian R. White

This paper proposes new estimators for the propensity score that aim to maximize the covariate distribution balance among different treatment groups. Heuristically, our proposed procedure attempts to estimate a propensity score model by…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-04-07 Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna , Xiaojun Song , Qi Xu

Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

Completely randomized experiments have been the gold standard for drawing causal inference because they can balance all potential confounding on average. However, they may suffer from unbalanced covariates for realized treatment…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Yuhao Wang , Xinran Li

Complete randomization balances covariates on average, but covariate imbalance often exists in finite samples. Rerandomization can ensure covariate balance in the realized experiment by discarding the undesired treatment assignments. Many…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-07 Xin Lu , Tianle Liu , Hanzhong Liu , Peng Ding

Covariate adaptive randomization (CAR) procedures are extensively used to reduce the likelihood of covariate imbalances occurring in clinical trials. In literatures, a lot of CAR procedures have been proposed so that the specified…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Zhang Li-Xin

Bayesian approaches for handling covariate measurement error are well established, and yet arguably are still relatively little used by researchers. For some this is likely due to unfamiliarity or disagreement with the Bayesian inferential…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-01 Jonathan W. Bartlett , Ruth H. Keogh

Causal analyses for observational studies are often complicated by covariate imbalances among treatment groups, and matching methodologies alleviate this complication by finding subsets of treatment groups that exhibit covariate balance. It…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-26 Zach Branson

Randomization is a common technique used in clinical trials to eliminate potential bias and confounders in a patient population. Equal allocation to treatment groups is the standard due to its optimal efficiency in many cases. However, in…

Applications · Statistics 2020-04-09 Thevaa Chandereng , Xiaodan Wei , Rick Chappell

In many scientific fields such as biology, psychology and sociology, there is an increasing interest in estimating the causal effect of a matrix exposure on an outcome. Covariate balancing is crucial in causal inference and both exact…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-14 Juan Chen , Yingchun Zhou