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This paper addresses the problem of identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment in the presence of unmeasured confounding and various types of right-censoring. Examples of these censoring mechanisms are administrative…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-19 Ilias Willems , Sara Rutten , Gilles Crommen , Ingrid Van Keilegom

The method of synthetic controls is widely used for evaluating causal effects of policy changes in settings with observational data. Often, researchers aim to estimate the causal impact of policy interventions on a treated unit at an…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-01-17 Florian Gunsilius , David Van Dijcke

This paper addresses the optimal control problem known as the Linear Quadratic Regulator in the case when the dynamics are unknown. We propose a multi-stage procedure, called Coarse-ID control, that estimates a model from a few experimental…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-17 Sarah Dean , Horia Mania , Nikolai Matni , Benjamin Recht , Stephen Tu

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

The propensity score (PS) is often used to control for large numbers of covariates in high-dimensional healthcare database studies. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) has become the most widely used tool for fitting…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-17 Richard Wyss , Ben B. Hansen , Georg Hahn , Lars van der Laan , Kueiyu Joshua Lin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) controllers have generated excitement within the control community. The primary advantage of RL controllers relative to existing methods is their ability to optimize uncertain systems independently of explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Max Mowbray , Panagiotis Petsagkourakis , Ehecatl Antonio del Río Chanona , Dongda Zhang

This paper studies the finite-horizon robust optimal control of constrained linear systems subject to model mismatch and additive stochastic disturbances. Utilizing the system level synthesis (SLS) parameterization, we propose a novel SLS…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-09 Yun Li , Jicheng Shi , Colin N. Jones , Neil Yorke-Smith , Tamas Keviczky

Estimation and inference procedures for synthetic control methods often do not allow for the existence of spillover effects, which are plausible in many applications. In this paper, we consider estimation and inference for synthetic control…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-23 Jianfei Cao , Connor Dowd

Synthetic control methods have gained popularity among causal studies with observational data, particularly when estimating the impacts of the interventions that are implemented to a small number of large units. Implementing the synthetic…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-05-29 Gyuhyeong Goh , Jisang Yu

Covariance steering (CS) synthesizes a control policy which drives the state's mean and covariance matrix towards desired values. Offering tractable computation of a closed-loop policy which can obey chance constraints in uncertain…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Naoya Kumagai , Kenshiro Oguri

In this paper, we propose a novel method for causal inference within the framework of counterfactual and synthetic control. Matching forward the generalized synthetic control method, our instrumented principal component analysis method…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-09-17 Cong Wang

We propose a pivotal method for estimating high-dimensional sparse linear regression models, where the overall number of regressors $p$ is large, possibly much larger than $n$, but only $s$ regressors are significant. The method is a…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-17 Alexandre Belloni , Victor Chernozhukov , Lie Wang

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

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

This work presents a sum-of-squares (SOS) based framework to perform data-driven stabilization and robust control tasks on discrete-time linear systems where the full-state observations are corrupted by L-infinity bounded input,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-31 Jared Miller , Tianyu Dai , Mario Sznaier

Regression discontinuity designs are frequently used to estimate the causal effect of election outcomes and policy interventions. In these contexts, treatment effects are typically estimated with covariates included to improve efficiency.…

Applications · Statistics 2020-05-06 L. Jason Anastasopoulos

We propose principled prediction intervals to quantify the uncertainty of a large class of synthetic control predictions (or estimators) in settings with staggered treatment adoption, offering precise non-asymptotic coverage probability…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-02-04 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Filippo Palomba , Rocio Titiunik

In this paper we present a layered approach for multi-agent control problem, decomposed into three stages, each building upon the results of the previous one. First, a high-level plan for a coarse abstraction of the system is computed,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Emily Clement , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Philipp Schlehuber-Caissier

Many correct-by-construction control synthesis methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Motivated by this challenge, we seek to reduce a correct-by-construction control synthesis problem to subproblems of more modest dimension. As a…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-10-13 Petter Nilsson , Necmiye Ozay

Without a control group, the most widespread methodologies for estimating causal effects cannot be applied. To fill this gap, we propose the Machine Learning Control Method, a new approach for causal panel analysis that estimates causal…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-10-28 Augusto Cerqua , Marco Letta , Fiammetta Menchetti