PUATE: Efficient Average Treatment Effect Estimation from Treated (Positive) and Unlabeled Units

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kato, Masahiro, Kozai, Fumiaki, Inokuchi, Ryo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kato, Masahiro
Kozai, Fumiaki
Inokuchi, Ryo
author_facet Kato, Masahiro
Kozai, Fumiaki
Inokuchi, Ryo
contents The estimation of average treatment effects (ATEs), defined as the difference in expected outcomes between treatment and control groups, is a central topic in causal inference. This study develops semiparametric efficient estimators for ATE in a setting where only a treatment group and an unlabeled group, consisting of units whose treatment status is unknown, are observed. This scenario constitutes a variant of learning from positive and unlabeled data (PU learning) and can be viewed as a special case of ATE estimation with missing data. For this setting, we derive the semiparametric efficiency bounds, which characterize the lowest achievable asymptotic variance for regular estimators. We then construct semiparametric efficient ATE estimators that attain these bounds. Our results contribute to the literature on causal inference with missing data and weakly supervised learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_19345
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PUATE: Efficient Average Treatment Effect Estimation from Treated (Positive) and Unlabeled Units
Kato, Masahiro
Kozai, Fumiaki
Inokuchi, Ryo
Machine Learning
Econometrics
Statistics Theory
Methodology
The estimation of average treatment effects (ATEs), defined as the difference in expected outcomes between treatment and control groups, is a central topic in causal inference. This study develops semiparametric efficient estimators for ATE in a setting where only a treatment group and an unlabeled group, consisting of units whose treatment status is unknown, are observed. This scenario constitutes a variant of learning from positive and unlabeled data (PU learning) and can be viewed as a special case of ATE estimation with missing data. For this setting, we derive the semiparametric efficiency bounds, which characterize the lowest achievable asymptotic variance for regular estimators. We then construct semiparametric efficient ATE estimators that attain these bounds. Our results contribute to the literature on causal inference with missing data and weakly supervised learning.
title PUATE: Efficient Average Treatment Effect Estimation from Treated (Positive) and Unlabeled Units
topic Machine Learning
Econometrics
Statistics Theory
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19345