Hierarchical Regression Discontinuity Design: Pursuing Subgroup Treatment Effects

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sugasawa, Shonosuke, Ishihara, Takuya, Kurisu, Daisuke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Sugasawa, Shonosuke
Ishihara, Takuya
Kurisu, Daisuke
author_facet Sugasawa, Shonosuke
Ishihara, Takuya
Kurisu, Daisuke
contents Regression discontinuity design (RDD) is widely adopted for causal inference under intervention determined by a continuous variable. While one is interested in treatment effect heterogeneity by subgroups in many applications, RDD typically suffers from small subgroup-wise sample sizes, which makes the estimation results highly instable. To solve this issue, we introduce hierarchical RDD (HRDD), a hierarchical Bayes approach for pursuing treatment effect heterogeneity in RDD. A key feature of HRDD is to employ a pseudo-model based on a loss function to estimate subgroup-level parameters of treatment effects under RDD, and assign a hierarchical prior distribution to ''borrow strength'' from other subgroups. The posterior computation can be easily done by a simple Gibbs sampling, and the optimal bandwidth can be automatically selected by the Hyvärinen scores for unnormalized models. We demonstrate the proposed HRDD through simulation and real data analysis, and show that HRDD provides much more stable point and interval estimation than separately applying the standard RDD method to each subgroup.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_01404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Regression Discontinuity Design: Pursuing Subgroup Treatment Effects
Sugasawa, Shonosuke
Ishihara, Takuya
Kurisu, Daisuke
Methodology
Regression discontinuity design (RDD) is widely adopted for causal inference under intervention determined by a continuous variable. While one is interested in treatment effect heterogeneity by subgroups in many applications, RDD typically suffers from small subgroup-wise sample sizes, which makes the estimation results highly instable. To solve this issue, we introduce hierarchical RDD (HRDD), a hierarchical Bayes approach for pursuing treatment effect heterogeneity in RDD. A key feature of HRDD is to employ a pseudo-model based on a loss function to estimate subgroup-level parameters of treatment effects under RDD, and assign a hierarchical prior distribution to ''borrow strength'' from other subgroups. The posterior computation can be easily done by a simple Gibbs sampling, and the optimal bandwidth can be automatically selected by the Hyvärinen scores for unnormalized models. We demonstrate the proposed HRDD through simulation and real data analysis, and show that HRDD provides much more stable point and interval estimation than separately applying the standard RDD method to each subgroup.
title Hierarchical Regression Discontinuity Design: Pursuing Subgroup Treatment Effects
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01404