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Approximate Residual Balancing: De-Biased Inference of Average Treatment Effects in High Dimensions

Susan Athey, Guido W. Imbens, Stefan Wager

arXiv 25 Apr 2016 · Statistics — Methodology · 6 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:1604.07125 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

There are many settings where researchers are interested in estimating average treatment effects and are willing to rely on the unconfoundedness assumption, which requires that the treatment assignment be as good as random conditional on pre-treatment variables. The unconfoundedness assumption is often more plausible if a large number of pre-treatment variables are included in the analysis, but this can worsen the performance of standard approaches to treatment effect estimation. In this paper, we develop a method for de-biasing penalized regression adjustments to allow sparse regression methods like the lasso to be used for sqrt{n}-consistent inference of average treatment effects in high-dimensional linear models. Given linearity, we do not need to assume that the treatment propensities are estimable, or that the average treatment effect is a sparse contrast of the outcome model parameters. Rather, in addition standard assumptions used to make lasso regression on the outcome model consistent under 1-norm error, we only require overlap, i.e., that the propensity score be uniformly bounded away from 0 and 1. Procedurally, our method combines balancing weights with a regularized regression adjustment.

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69
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1A. Belloni, V. Chernozhukov, and C. Hansen (2014) Inference on treatment effects after selection among high-dimensional controls1.000145100%
2J. R. Zubizarreta (2015) Stable weights that balance covariates for estimation with incomplete outcome data1.000113100%
3M. H. Farrell (2015) Robust inference on average treatment effects with possibly more covariates than observations1.00094100%
4A. Belloni, V. Chernozhukov, I. Fernández-Val, and C. Hansen (2017) Program evaluation and causal inference with high-dimensional data1.00084100%
5J. M. Robins, A. Rotnitzky, and L. P. Zhao (1994) Estimation of regression coefficients when some regressors are not always observed1.00064100%
6M. J. Van Der Laan and D. Rubin (2006) Targeted maximum likelihood learning0.92844100%
7J. Kang and J. Schafer (2007) Demystifying double robustness: A comparison of alternative strategies for estimating a population mean from incomplete data0.92843100%
8J. Hainmueller (2012) Entropy balancing for causal effects: A multivariate reweighting method to produce balanced samples in observational studies0.87482100%
9A. Javanmard and A. Montanari (2014) Confidence intervals and hypothesis testing for high-dimensional regression0.87482100%
10B. Graham, C. Pinto, and D. Egel (2012) Inverse probability tilting for moment condition models with missing data0.87472100%

Showing the top 10 of 69 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Minimax Semiparametric Learning With Approximate Sparsity1.00054
21805.050670.95684
3Double/Debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Structural Parameters0.81142
4High-Dimensional Econometrics and Regularized GMM0.51121
5Minimax Kernel Machine Learning for a Class of Doubly Robust Functionals with Application to Proximal Causal Inference0.40521
6Automatic Double Machine Learning for Continuous Treatment Effects0.40511
72606.290090.40511
8Double Debiased Machine Learning Nonparametric Inference with Continuous Treatments0.00011