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Related papers: Treatment effect: a critique

200 papers

Causal inference in a program evaluation setting faces the problem of external validity when the treatment effect in the target population is different from the treatment effect identified from the population of which the sample is…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-23 Kyungchul Song , Zhengfei Yu

This study considers treatment effect models in which others' treatment decisions can affect both one's own treatment and outcome. Focusing on the case of two-player interactions, we formulate treatment decision behavior as a complete…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-02-23 Tadao Hoshino , Takahide Yanagi

We derive a formal, decision-based method for comparing the performance of counterfactual treatment regime predictions using the results of experiments that give relevant information on the distribution of treated outcomes. Our approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-24 Michael Gechter , Cyrus Samii , Rajeev Dehejia , Cristian Pop-Eleches

Treatment effect estimation is a fundamental problem in causal inference. We focus on designing efficient randomized controlled trials, to accurately estimate the effect of some treatment on a population of $n$ individuals. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Raghavendra Addanki , David Arbour , Tung Mai , Cameron Musco , Anup Rao

The fundamental problem in treatment effect estimation from observational data is confounder identification and balancing. Most of the previous methods realized confounder balancing by treating all observed pre-treatment variables as…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-13 Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Junkun Yuan , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Qiang Zhu , Yueting Zhuang , Fei Wu

Counterfactuals are often described as 'retrospective,' focusing on hypothetical alternatives to a realized past. This description relates to an often implicit assumption about the structure and stability of exogenous variables in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Lucius E. J. Bynum , Joshua R. Loftus , Julia Stoyanovich

Treatment effect estimation is essential for informed decision-making in many fields such as healthcare, economics, and public policy. While flexible machine learning models have been widely applied for estimating heterogeneous treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Pascal Memmesheimer , Vincent Heuveline , Jürgen Hesser

This paper analyzes difference-in-differences designs with a continuous treatment. We show that treatment-on-the-treated-type parameters are identified under a parallel trends assumption analogous to the binary treatment case. However,…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-05 Brantly Callaway , Andrew Goodman-Bacon , Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna

We propose a formal model for counterfactual estimation with unobserved confounding in "data-rich" settings, i.e., where there are a large number of units and a large number of measurements per unit. Our model provides a bridge between the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-04-03 Alberto Abadie , Anish Agarwal , Devavrat Shah

This paper investigates the use of regularization priors in the context of treatment effect estimation using observational data where the number of control variables is large relative to the number of observations. First, the phenomenon of…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-30 P. Richard Hahn , Carlos M. Carvalho , Jingyu He , David Puelz

There is a large literature on semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignment in settings with a fixed number of covariates. More recently attention has focused on settings with a large number…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-26 Susan Athey , Guido Imbens , Thai Pham , Stefan Wager

Across domains such as medicine, employment, and criminal justice, predictive models often target labels that imperfectly reflect the outcomes of interest to experts and policymakers. For example, clinical risk assessments deployed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Luke Guerdan , Amanda Coston , Kenneth Holstein , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Counterfactuals are central in causal human reasoning and the scientific discovery process. The uplift, also called conditional average treatment effect, measures the causal effect of some action, or treatment, on the outcome of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Théo Verhelst , Denis Mercier , Jeevan Shrestha , Gianluca Bontempi

This paper considers the identification of dynamic treatment effects with panel data, in complex designs where the treatment may not be binary and may not be absorbing. We first show that under no-anticipation and parallel-trends…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-23 Clément de Chaisemartin , Xavier D'Haultfœuille

Estimating the counterfactual outcome of treatment is essential for decision-making in public health and clinical science, among others. Often, treatments are administered in a sequential, time-varying manner, leading to an exponentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-16 Shenghao Wu , Wenbin Zhou , Minshuo Chen , Shixiang Zhu

Estimating the long-term effects of treatments is of interest in many fields. A common challenge in estimating such treatment effects is that long-term outcomes are unobserved in the time frame needed to make policy decisions. One approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-23 Susan Athey , Raj Chetty , Guido Imbens , Hyunseung Kang

In this commentary, we highlight the importance of: (1) carefully considering and clarifying whether a marginal or conditional treatment effect is of interest in a population-adjusted indirect treatment comparison; and (2) developing…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-05 Antonio Remiro-Azócar , Anna Heath , Gianluca Baio

The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-31 Dustin Tran , Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Susan Athey , David M. Blei

We consider a general difference-in-differences model in which the treatment variable of interest may be non-binary and its value may change in each period. It is generally difficult to estimate treatment parameters defined with the…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-05-30 Takahide Yanagi

Identifying subgroups, which respond differently to a treatment, both in terms of efficacy and safety, is an important part of drug development. A well-known challenge in exploratory subgroup analyses is the small sample size in the…

Computation · Statistics 2016-06-28 Marius Thomas , Björn Bornkamp