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Causal Gradient Boosting: Boosted Instrumental Variable Regression

Edvard Bakhitov, Amandeep Singh

arXiv 15 Jan 2021 · Econometrics · publishedProceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2022) · 14 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2101.06078 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Recent advances in the literature have demonstrated that standard supervised learning algorithms are ill-suited for problems with endogenous explanatory variables. To correct for the endogeneity bias, many variants of nonparameteric instrumental variable regression methods have been developed. In this paper, we propose an alternative algorithm called boostIV that builds on the traditional gradient boosting algorithm and corrects for the endogeneity bias. The algorithm is very intuitive and resembles an iterative version of the standard 2SLS estimator. Moreover, our approach is data driven, meaning that the researcher does not have to make a stance on neither the form of the target function approximation nor the choice of instruments. We demonstrate that our estimator is consistent under mild conditions. We carry out extensive Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the finite sample performance of our algorithm compared to other recently developed methods. We show that boostIV is at worst on par with the existing methods and on average significantly outperforms them.

Citation extraction

34
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72
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 87% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

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
1Friedman, Jerome H (2001) Greedy function approximation: a gradient boosting machine1.00053100%
2Zhang, Tong, Yu, Bin (2005) Boosting with early stopping: Convergence and consistency0.83817459%
3Newey, Whitney K, Powell, James L (2003) Instrumental variable estimation of nonparametric models0.81142100%
4Bühlmann, Peter, Hothorn, Torsten (2007) Boosting algorithms: Regularization, prediction and model fitting0.73732100%
5Chamberlain, Gary (1987) Asymptotic efficiency in estimation with conditional moment restrictions0.73732100%
6Hartford, Jason, Lewis, Greg, Leyton-Brown, Kevin, Taddy, Matt (2017) Deep IV: A flexible approach for counterfactual prediction0.73732100%
7Berry, Steven T, Haile, Philip A (2014) Identification in differentiated products markets using market level data0.69351100%
8Breiman, Leo (1998) Arcing classifiers0.64422100%
9Bühlmann, Peter, Yu, Bin (2003) Boosting with the L 2 loss: regression and classification0.64422100%
10Schapire, Robert E (1990) The strength of weak learnability0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 34 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
1Penalized GMM Framework for Inference on Functionals of Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Estimators0.64422
2Causal Bandits: Online Decision-Making in Endogenous Settings0.40511