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This paper proposes a doubly robust two-stage semiparametric difference-in-difference estimator for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with high-dimensional data. Our new estimator is robust to model miss-specifications and allows…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-09-08 Yang Ning , Sida Peng , Jing Tao

A central obstacle in the objective assessment of treatment effect (TE) estimators in randomized control trials (RCTs) is the lack of ground truth (or validation set) to test their performance. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Online controlled experiments play a crucial role in enabling data-driven decisions across a wide range of companies. Variance reduction is an effective technique to improve the sensitivity of experiments, achieving higher statistical power…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Hao Zhou , Kun Sun , Shaoming Li , Yangfeng Fan , Guibin Jiang , Jiaqi Zheng , Tao Li

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Continuous control Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are known to suffer from estimation biases, leading to suboptimal policies. This paper introduces innovative methods in RL, focusing on addressing and exploiting estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Niccolò Turcato , Alberto Sinigaglia , Alberto Dalla Libera , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

Causal effect estimation under networked interference is an important but challenging problem. Available parametric methods are limited in their model space, while previous semiparametric methods, e.g., leveraging neural networks to fit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Weilin Chen , Ruichu Cai , Zeqin Yang , Jie Qiao , Yuguang Yan , Zijian Li , Zhifeng Hao

We study the problem of selecting the best heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimator from a collection of candidates in settings where the treatment effect is fundamentally unobserved. We cast estimator selection as a multiple testing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-25 Jiayi Guo , Zijun Gao

We consider the problem of estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) when both randomized control trial (RCT) data and external real-world data (RWD) are available. We decompose the ATE estimand as the difference between a pooled-ATE…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-22 Mark van der Laan , Sky Qiu , Jens Magelund Tarp , Lars van der Laan

In observational study, the propensity score has the central role to estimate causal effects. Since the propensity score is usually unknown, estimating by appropriate procedures is an indispensable step. A point to note that a causal effect…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-19 Shunichiro Orihara

Observational studies have recently received significant attention from the machine learning community due to the increasingly available non-experimental observational data and the limitations of the experimental studies, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Vinod Kumar Chauhan , Soheila Molaei , Marzia Hoque Tania , Anshul Thakur , Tingting Zhu , David A. Clifton

Motivated by customer loyalty plans and scholarship programs, we study tie-breaker designs which are hybrids of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and regression discontinuity designs (RDDs). We quantify the statistical efficiency of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-03 Art B. Owen , Hal Varian

Statistical methods for causal inference with continuous treatments mainly focus on estimating the mean potential outcome function, commonly known as the dose-response curve. However, it is often not the dose-response curve but its…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-21 Yikun Zhang , Yen-Chi Chen

We regularly consider answering counterfactual questions in practice, such as "Would people with diabetes take a turn for the better had they choose another medication?". Observational studies are growing in significance in answering such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Guanglin Zhou , Lina Yao , Xiwei Xu , Chen Wang , Liming Zhu

We study two-way-fixed-effects regressions (TWFE) with several treatment variables. Under a parallel trends assumption, we show that the coefficient on each treatment identifies a weighted sum of that treatment's effect, with possibly…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-04-18 Clément de Chaisemartin , Xavier D'Haultfœuille

Doubly robust (DR) estimators guard against model misspecification but remain sensitive to weak covariate overlap. We show that trimming propensity scores reduces variance but eliminates double robustness. We introduce DR estimators that…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-17 Yukun Ma , Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna , Yuya Sasaki , Takuya Ura

Understanding how treatment effects vary across patient characteristics is essential for personalized medicine, yet randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often underpowered to detect heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs). We propose a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-22 Amir Asiaee , Chiara Di Gravio , Cole Beck , Yuting Mei , Samhita Pal , Jared D. Huling

Modern causal inference methods allow machine learning to be used to weaken parametric modeling assumptions. However, the use of machine learning may result in complications for inference. Doubly-robust cross-fit estimators have been…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-11 Paul N Zivich , Alexander Breskin

The research is about a systematic investigation on the following issues. First, we construct different outcome regression-based estimators for conditional average treatment effect under, respectively, true (oracle), parametric,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-23 Lu Li , Niwen Zhou , Lixing Zhu

Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) are increasingly used to evaluate mobile health interventions with binary proximal outcomes. Standard inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimators are unbiased but unstable in small samples or under extreme…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-10 Jinho Cha , Eunchan Cha

In many practical situations, randomly assigning treatments to subjects is uncommon due to feasibility constraints. For example, economic aid programs and merit-based scholarships are often restricted to those meeting specific income or…