Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects of High-Dimensional Treatments: Application to Conjoint Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Goplerud, Max, Imai, Kosuke, Pashley, Nicole E.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913865456943104
author Goplerud, Max
Imai, Kosuke
Pashley, Nicole E.
author_facet Goplerud, Max
Imai, Kosuke
Pashley, Nicole E.
contents Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is an active area of research. Most of the existing methods, however, focus on estimating the conditional average treatment effects of a single, binary treatment given a set of pre-treatment covariates. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the heterogeneous causal effects of high-dimensional treatments, which poses unique challenges in terms of estimation and interpretation. The proposed approach finds maximally heterogeneous groups and uses a Bayesian mixture of regularized logistic regressions to identify groups of units who exhibit similar patterns of treatment effects. By directly modeling group membership with covariates, the proposed methodology allows one to explore the unit characteristics that are associated with different patterns of treatment effects. Our motivating application is conjoint analysis, which is a popular type of survey experiment in social science and marketing research and is based on a high-dimensional factorial design. We apply the proposed methodology to the conjoint data, where survey respondents are asked to select one of two immigrant profiles with randomly selected attributes. We find that a group of respondents with a relatively high degree of prejudice appears to discriminate against immigrants from non-European countries like Iraq. An open-source software package is available for implementing the proposed methodology.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2201_01357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects of High-Dimensional Treatments: Application to Conjoint Analysis
Goplerud, Max
Imai, Kosuke
Pashley, Nicole E.
Methodology
Applications
Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects is an active area of research. Most of the existing methods, however, focus on estimating the conditional average treatment effects of a single, binary treatment given a set of pre-treatment covariates. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the heterogeneous causal effects of high-dimensional treatments, which poses unique challenges in terms of estimation and interpretation. The proposed approach finds maximally heterogeneous groups and uses a Bayesian mixture of regularized logistic regressions to identify groups of units who exhibit similar patterns of treatment effects. By directly modeling group membership with covariates, the proposed methodology allows one to explore the unit characteristics that are associated with different patterns of treatment effects. Our motivating application is conjoint analysis, which is a popular type of survey experiment in social science and marketing research and is based on a high-dimensional factorial design. We apply the proposed methodology to the conjoint data, where survey respondents are asked to select one of two immigrant profiles with randomly selected attributes. We find that a group of respondents with a relatively high degree of prejudice appears to discriminate against immigrants from non-European countries like Iraq. An open-source software package is available for implementing the proposed methodology.
title Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects of High-Dimensional Treatments: Application to Conjoint Analysis
topic Methodology
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01357