论文标题

治疗效果风险:界限和推理

Treatment Effect Risk: Bounds and Inference

论文作者

Kallus, Nathan

论文摘要

由于平均治疗效果(ATE)可以衡量社会福利的变化,即使是积极的,也存在对大约10%人口的负面影响的风险。但是,很难评估这种风险,因为从未观察到任何一个单独的治疗效果(ITE),因此无法识别出10%的受影响最差的治疗效果,而分布治疗效果仅比较每个治疗组中的第一个十分位数,这与任何10%的人群相对应。在本文中,我们考虑如何评估这种重要的风险措施,正式为ITE分布的风险(CVAR)的条件价值。我们利用预处理协变量的可用性,并表征了协变量平均治疗效果(CATE)功能给出的ITE-VAR上最紧密的上限和下限。然后,我们继续研究如何从数据中有效估计这些界限并构建置信区间。即使在随机实验中,这也很具有挑战性,因为它需要了解未知CATE函数的分布,如果我们使用富协变量以最佳控制异质性,这可能非常复杂。我们开发了一种克服这种依据方法,该方法克服了这一点,并证明即使通过黑盒机器学习估算CATE和其他令人讨厌的统计属性,甚至不一致。我们的界限和推论研究了法国搜索咨询服务的假设变化,这表明社会收益很小,这对实质性亚人群产生了负面影响。

Since the average treatment effect (ATE) measures the change in social welfare, even if positive, there is a risk of negative effect on, say, some 10% of the population. Assessing such risk is difficult, however, because any one individual treatment effect (ITE) is never observed, so the 10% worst-affected cannot be identified, while distributional treatment effects only compare the first deciles within each treatment group, which does not correspond to any 10%-subpopulation. In this paper we consider how to nonetheless assess this important risk measure, formalized as the conditional value at risk (CVaR) of the ITE-distribution. We leverage the availability of pre-treatment covariates and characterize the tightest-possible upper and lower bounds on ITE-CVaR given by the covariate-conditional average treatment effect (CATE) function. We then proceed to study how to estimate these bounds efficiently from data and construct confidence intervals. This is challenging even in randomized experiments as it requires understanding the distribution of the unknown CATE function, which can be very complex if we use rich covariates so as to best control for heterogeneity. We develop a debiasing method that overcomes this and prove it enjoys favorable statistical properties even when CATE and other nuisances are estimated by black-box machine learning or even inconsistently. Studying a hypothetical change to French job-search counseling services, our bounds and inference demonstrate a small social benefit entails a negative impact on a substantial subpopulation.

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