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Related papers: Balancing Covariates in Survey Experiments

200 papers

Randomized experiments are the "gold standard" for estimating causal effects, yet often in practice, chance imbalances exist in covariate distributions between treatment groups. If covariate data are available before units are exposed to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-07-25 Kari Lock Morgan , Donald B. Rubin

Randomization, as a key technique in clinical trials, can eliminate sources of bias and produce comparable treatment groups. In randomized experiments, the treatment effect is a parameter of general interest. Researchers have explored the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-05 Fuyi Tu , Wei Ma , Hanzhong Liu

The statistical efficiency of randomized clinical trials can be improved by incorporating information from baseline covariates (i.e., pre-treatment patient characteristics). This can be done in the design stage using stratified (permutated…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-04 Zhiwei Zhang

We introduce a new randomization procedure for experiments based on the cube method, which achieves near-exact covariate balance. This ensures compliance with standard balance tests and allows for balancing on many covariates, enabling more…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-21 Laurent Davezies , Guillaume Hollard , Pedro Vergara Merino

Covariate balancing is a popular technique for controlling confounding in observational studies. It finds weights for the treatment group which are close to uniform, but make the group's covariate means (approximately) equal to those of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-07 Shiva Kaul , Min-Gyu Kim

We propose a novel regression adjustment method designed for estimating distributional treatment effect parameters in randomized experiments. Randomized experiments have been extensively used to estimate treatment effects in various…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-24 Undral Byambadalai , Tatsushi Oka , Shota Yasui

Treatment-covariate interaction tests are commonly applied by researchers to examine whether the treatment effect varies across patient subgroups defined by baseline characteristics. The objective of this study is to explore…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-12 Likun Zhang , Wei Ma

Two commonly used methods for improving precision and power in clinical trials are stratified randomization and covariate adjustment. However, many trials do not fully capitalize on the combined precision gains from these two methods, which…

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

The design of experiments involves a compromise between covariate balance and robustness. This paper provides a formalization of this trade-off and describes an experimental design that allows experimenters to navigate it. The design is…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-16 Christopher Harshaw , Fredrik Sävje , Daniel Spielman , Peng Zhang

We address estimation of intervention effects in experimental designs in which (a) interventions are assigned at the cluster level; (b) clusters are selected to form pairs, matched on observed characteristics; and (c) intervention is…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-24 Zhenke Wu , Constantine E. Frangakis , Thomas A. Louis , Daniel O. Scharfstein

Covariate-adaptive randomization is widely employed to balance baseline covariates in interventional studies such as clinical trials and experiments in development economics. Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in inference…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-30 Jiahui Xin , Hanzhong Liu , Wei Ma

In randomized experiments, treatment and control groups should be roughly the same--balanced--in their distributions of pretreatment variables. But how nearly so? Can descriptive comparisons meaningfully be paired with significance tests?…

Methodology · Statistics 2008-08-29 Ben B. Hansen , Jake Bowers

Analyses of randomised trials are often based on regression models which adjust for baseline covariates, in addition to randomised group. Based on such models, one can obtain estimates of the marginal mean outcome for the population under…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-07-17 Jonathan W. Bartlett

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

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

We consider the problem of designing a randomized experiment on a source population to estimate the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) on a target population. We propose a novel approach which explicitly considers the target when designing the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-07 My Phan , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery , Anup B. Rao

We study the estimation of treatment effects using samples stratified by treatment status. Standard estimators of the average treatment effect and the local average treatment effect are inconsistent in this setting. We propose consistent…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-04-28 Jinyong Hahn , John Ham , Geert Ridder , Shuyang Sheng

Propensity score weighting is a common method for estimating treatment effects with survey data. The method is applied to minimize confounding using measured covariates that are often different between individuals in treatment and control.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-06 Yukang Zeng , Fan Li , Guangyu Tong

Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for estimating causal effects. Trial findings are often used to inform policy and programming efforts, yet their results may not generalize well to a relevant target population due to…