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Related papers: A Relaxation Approach to Synthetic Control

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The Synthetic Control method (SC) has become a valuable tool for estimating causal effects. Originally designed for single-treated unit scenarios, it has recently found applications in high-dimensional disaggregated settings with multiple…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-28 Ye Shen , Rui Song , Alberto Abadie

We introduce new inference procedures for counterfactual and synthetic control methods for policy evaluation. We recast the causal inference problem as a counterfactual prediction and a structural breaks testing problem. This allows us to…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-26 Victor Chernozhukov , Kaspar Wüthrich , Yinchu Zhu

This paper investigates the use of synthetic control methods for causal inference in macroeconomic settings when dealing with possibly nonstationary data. While the synthetic control approach has gained popularity for estimating…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-29 Zhentao Shi , Jin Xi , Haitian Xie

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

We provide an analytical characterization of the model flexibility of the synthetic control method (SCM) in the familiar form of degrees of freedom. We obtain estimable information criteria, which may be used to circumvent cross-validation…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-12 Guillaume Allaire Pouliot , Zhen Xie , Ziyi Liu

The synthetic control method estimates the causal effect by comparing the treated unit's outcomes to a weighted average of control units that closely match its pre-treatment outcomes, assuming the relationship between treated and control…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-07 Taehyeon Koo , Zijian Guo

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

Suboptimal model predictive control is a technique that can reduce the computational cost of model predictive control (MPC) by exploiting its robustness to incomplete optimization. Instead of solving the optimal control problem exactly,…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-05-08 Dominic Liao-McPherson , Marco Nicotra , Ilya Kolmanovsky

This paper reinterprets the Synthetic Control (SC) framework through the lens of weighting philosophy, arguing that the contrast between traditional SC and Difference-in-Differences (DID) reflects two distinct modeling mindsets: sparse…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-31 Le Wang , Xin Xing , Youhui Ye

This paper addresses the problem of control synthesis for nonlinear optimal control problems in the presence of state and input constraints. The presented approach relies upon transforming the given problem into an infinite-dimensional…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-03 Pengcheng Zhao , Shankar Mohan , Ram Vasudevan

We introduce a synthetic control methodology to study policies with staggered adoption. Many policies, such as the board gender diversity policies, are replicated by other policy setters at different time frames. Our method estimates the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-18 Jianfei Cao , Shirley Lu , Hang Wu

We consider the feedback design for stabilizing a rigid body system by making and breaking multiple contacts with the environment without prespecifying the timing or the number of occurrence of the contacts. We model such a system as a…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Weiqiao Han , Russ Tedrake

The synthetic control estimator (Abadie et al., 2010) is asymptotically unbiased assuming that the outcome is a linear function of the underlying predictors and that the treated unit can be well approximated by the synthetic control before…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-06-06 Wei Tian

The challenges posed by high-dimensional data and use of the simplex constraint are two major concerns in the empirical application of the synthetic control method (SCM) in econometric studies. To address both issues simultaneously, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-02 Yihong Xu , Quan Zhou

We analyze the synthetic control (SC) method in panel data settings with many units. We assume the treatment assignment is based on unobserved heterogeneity and pre-treatment information, allowing for both strictly and sequentially…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-27 Dmitry Arkhangelsky , David Hirshberg

This paper proposes a simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm for controlling systems with uncertain and varying system parameters. While simulators are useful for safely learning control policies, the reality gap remains a major…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-14 Junya Ikemoto

The synthetic control method has become a widely popular tool to estimate causal effects with observational data. Despite this, inference for synthetic control methods remains challenging. Often, inferential results rely on linear factor…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-09 Ignacio Martinez , Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

We investigate the optimal design of experimental studies that have pre-treatment outcome data available. The average treatment effect is estimated as the difference between the weighted average outcomes of the treated and control units. A…

In controlled industrial environments, ensuring safety and performance during controller tuning is a challenging and critical task. In particular, control loops in compressor-plenum-throttle systems cannot tolerate costly interruptions, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-04 Margarita A. Guerrero , Rodrigo A. González , Cristian R. Rojas

In its quest for approaches to taming uncertainty in self-adaptive systems (SAS), the research community has largely focused on solutions that adapt the SAS architecture or behaviour in response to uncertainty. By comparison, solutions that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Marc Carwehl , Calum Imrie , Thomas Vogel , Genaína Rodrigues , Radu Calinescu , Lars Grunske