Externally Valid Policy Choice

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Adjaho, Christopher, Christensen, Timothy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Adjaho, Christopher
Christensen, Timothy
author_facet Adjaho, Christopher
Christensen, Timothy
contents We consider the problem of estimating personalized treatment policies that are "externally valid" or "generalizable": they perform well in target populations that differ from the experimental (or training) population from which the data are sampled. We first show that welfare-maximizing policies for the experimental population are robust to a certain class of shifts in the distribution of potential outcomes between the experimental and target populations (holding characteristics fixed). We then develop methods for estimating policies that are robust to shifts in the joint distribution of outcomes and characteristics. In doing so, we highlight how treatment effect heterogeneity within the experimental population shapes external validity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2205_05561
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Externally Valid Policy Choice
Adjaho, Christopher
Christensen, Timothy
Econometrics
Machine Learning
We consider the problem of estimating personalized treatment policies that are "externally valid" or "generalizable": they perform well in target populations that differ from the experimental (or training) population from which the data are sampled. We first show that welfare-maximizing policies for the experimental population are robust to a certain class of shifts in the distribution of potential outcomes between the experimental and target populations (holding characteristics fixed). We then develop methods for estimating policies that are robust to shifts in the joint distribution of outcomes and characteristics. In doing so, we highlight how treatment effect heterogeneity within the experimental population shapes external validity.
title Externally Valid Policy Choice
topic Econometrics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05561