Class flipping for uplift modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effect estimation on imbalanced RCT data

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Rudaś, Krzysztof, Jaroszewicz, Szymon
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Rudaś, Krzysztof
Jaroszewicz, Szymon
author_facet Rudaś, Krzysztof
Jaroszewicz, Szymon
contents Uplift modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) estimation aim at predicting the causal effect of an action, such as a medical treatment or a marketing campaign on a specific individual. In this paper, we focus on data from Randomized Controlled Experiments which guarantee causal interpretation of the outcomes. Class and treatment imbalance are important problems in uplift modeling/HTE, but classical undersampling or oversampling based approaches are hard to apply in this case since they distort the predicted effect. Calibration methods have been proposed in the past, however, they do not guarantee correct predictions. In this work, we propose an approach alternative to undersampling, based on flipping the class value of selected records. We show that the proposed approach does not distort the predicted effect and does not require calibration. The method is especially useful for models based on class variable transformation (modified outcome models). We address those models separately, designing a transformation scheme which guarantees correct predictions and addresses also the problem of treatment imbalance which is especially important for those models. Experiments fully confirm our theoretical results. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method is a viable alternative also for standard classification problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_10009
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Class flipping for uplift modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effect estimation on imbalanced RCT data
Rudaś, Krzysztof
Jaroszewicz, Szymon
Machine Learning
Uplift modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) estimation aim at predicting the causal effect of an action, such as a medical treatment or a marketing campaign on a specific individual. In this paper, we focus on data from Randomized Controlled Experiments which guarantee causal interpretation of the outcomes. Class and treatment imbalance are important problems in uplift modeling/HTE, but classical undersampling or oversampling based approaches are hard to apply in this case since they distort the predicted effect. Calibration methods have been proposed in the past, however, they do not guarantee correct predictions. In this work, we propose an approach alternative to undersampling, based on flipping the class value of selected records. We show that the proposed approach does not distort the predicted effect and does not require calibration. The method is especially useful for models based on class variable transformation (modified outcome models). We address those models separately, designing a transformation scheme which guarantees correct predictions and addresses also the problem of treatment imbalance which is especially important for those models. Experiments fully confirm our theoretical results. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method is a viable alternative also for standard classification problems.
title Class flipping for uplift modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effect estimation on imbalanced RCT data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10009