English
Related papers

Related papers: Treatment effect: a critique

200 papers

The widely used 'Counterfactual' definition of Causal Effects was derived for unbiasedness and accuracy - and not generalizability. We propose a Combinatorial definition for the External Validity (EV) of intervention effects. We first…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-18 Andre F. Ribeiro

Personalized treatment effect estimates are often of interest in high-stakes applications -- thus, before deploying a model estimating such effects in practice, one needs to be sure that the best candidate from the ever-growing machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-07 Alicia Curth , Mihaela van der Schaar

In this work, we consider causal inference in various high-dimensional treatment settings, including for single multi-valued treatments and vector treatments with binary or continuous components, when the number of treatments can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-26 Patrick Kramer , Edward H. Kennedy , Isaac M. Opper

Causal inference has received great attention across different fields from economics, statistics, education, medicine, to machine learning. Within this area, inferring causal effects at individual level in observational studies has become…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-02-16 Thai Pham

We consider point estimation and inference for the treatment effect path of a policy. Examples include dynamic treatment effects in microeconomics, impulse response functions in macroeconomics, and event study paths in finance. We present…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-20 Simon Freyaldenhoven , Christian Hansen

Causal evidence is needed to act and it is often enough for the evidence to point towards a direction of the effect of an action. For example, policymakers might be interested in estimating the effect of slightly increasing taxes on private…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-11 Dominik Rothenhäusler , Bin Yu

When engagement with a randomized trial is driven by factors that affect the outcome or when trial engagement directly affects the outcome independent of treatment, the average treatment effect among trial participants is unlikely to…

Canonical RD designs yield credible local estimates of the treatment effect at the cutoff under mild continuity assumptions, but they fail to identify treatment effects away from the cutoff without additional assumptions. The fundamental…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-01 Yiwei Sun

In most nonrandomized observational studies, differences between treatment groups may arise not only due to the treatment but also because of the effect of confounders. Therefore, causal inference regarding the treatment effect is not as…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-07-04 Debashis Ghosh

Nonlinear longitudinal proportional effect models have been proposed to improve power and provide direct estimates of the proportional treatment effect in randomized clinical trials. These models assume a fixed proportional treatment effect…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-23 Michael C. Donohue , Philip S. Insel , Oliver Langford

Standard tests of the "no-treatment-effect" hypothesis for a comparative experiment include permutation tests, the Wilcoxon rank sum test, two-sample $t$ tests, and Fisher-type randomization tests. Practitioners are aware that these…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-11 Joseph B. Lang

In the quest to make defensible causal claims from observational data, it is sometimes possible to leverage information from "placebo treatments" and "placebo outcomes". Existing approaches employing such information focus largely on point…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-26 Adam Rohde , Chad Hazlett

Time plays a fundamental role in causal analyses, where the goal is to quantify the effect of a specific treatment on future outcomes. In a randomized experiment, times of treatment, and when outcomes are observed, are typically well…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-01-19 Guillaume W. Basse , Alexander Volfovsky , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Empirical work often uses treatment assigned following geographic boundaries. When the effects of treatment cross over borders, classical difference-in-differences estimation produces biased estimates for the average treatment effect. In…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-06-13 Kyle Butts

The policy relevant treatment effect (PRTE) measures the average effect of switching from a status-quo policy to a counterfactual policy. Estimation of the PRTE involves estimation of multiple preliminary parameters, including propensity…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-07-17 Yuya Sasaki , Takuya Ura

Good models require good training data. For overparameterized deep models, the causal relationship between training data and model predictions is increasingly opaque and poorly understood. Influence analysis partially demystifies training's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Zayd Hammoudeh , Daniel Lowd

To act safely and ethically in the real world, agents must be able to reason about harm and avoid harmful actions. However, to date there is no statistical method for measuring harm and factoring it into algorithmic decisions. In this paper…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Jonathan G. Richens , Rory Beard , Daniel H. Thompson

We propose a new, flexible model for inference of the effect of a binary treatment on a continuous outcome observed over subsequent time periods. The model allows to seperate association due to endogeneity of treatment selection from…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-02 Helga Wagner , Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter , Liana Jacobi

Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Danielle Tsao , Krikamol Muandet , Frederick Eberhardt , Emilija Perković

Many researchers have applied classical statistical decision theory to evaluate treatment choices and learn optimal policies. However, because this framework is based solely on realized outcomes under chosen decisions and ignores…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Benedikt Koch , Kosuke Imai