CATE Estimation With Potential Outcome Imputation From Local Regression

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Aloui, Ahmed, Dong, Juncheng, Le, Cat P., Tarokh, Vahid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911005548740608
author Aloui, Ahmed
Dong, Juncheng
Le, Cat P.
Tarokh, Vahid
author_facet Aloui, Ahmed
Dong, Juncheng
Le, Cat P.
Tarokh, Vahid
contents One of the most significant challenges in Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation is the statistical discrepancy between distinct treatment groups. To address this issue, we propose a model-agnostic data augmentation method for CATE estimation. First, we derive regret bounds for general data augmentation methods suggesting that a small imputation error may be necessary for accurate CATE estimation. Inspired by this idea, we propose a contrastive learning approach that reliably imputes missing potential outcomes for a selected subset of individuals formed using a similarity measure. We augment the original dataset with these reliable imputations to reduce the discrepancy between different treatment groups while inducing minimal imputation error. The augmented dataset can subsequently be employed to train standard CATE estimation models. We provide both theoretical guarantees and extensive numerical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in improving the accuracy and robustness of numerous CATE estimation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_03630
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CATE Estimation With Potential Outcome Imputation From Local Regression
Aloui, Ahmed
Dong, Juncheng
Le, Cat P.
Tarokh, Vahid
Machine Learning
Methodology
One of the most significant challenges in Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation is the statistical discrepancy between distinct treatment groups. To address this issue, we propose a model-agnostic data augmentation method for CATE estimation. First, we derive regret bounds for general data augmentation methods suggesting that a small imputation error may be necessary for accurate CATE estimation. Inspired by this idea, we propose a contrastive learning approach that reliably imputes missing potential outcomes for a selected subset of individuals formed using a similarity measure. We augment the original dataset with these reliable imputations to reduce the discrepancy between different treatment groups while inducing minimal imputation error. The augmented dataset can subsequently be employed to train standard CATE estimation models. We provide both theoretical guarantees and extensive numerical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in improving the accuracy and robustness of numerous CATE estimation models.
title CATE Estimation With Potential Outcome Imputation From Local Regression
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03630