论文标题

选择治疗方法的收缩方法

Shrinkage Methods for Treatment Choice

论文作者

Ishihara, Takuya, Kurisu, Daisuke

论文摘要

这项研究检查了确定是否基于观察到的协变量来治疗个体的问题。最常见的决策规则是曼斯基(Manski,2004)提出的有条件经验成功(CES)规则,该规则将个体分配给在观察到的协变量条件下产生最佳实验结果的治疗。相反,使用收缩估计器(对这些估计平均值的平均值缩小但嘈杂的初步估计)是统计估计问题中的一种常见方法,因为众所周知,收缩估计器的平均平方误差可能比UNSHRUNK估计器较小。受这个想法的启发,我们提出了一项可计算上的收缩规则,该规则通过最大程度地减少最大遗憾的上限来选择收缩因子。然后,我们将提议的收缩规则的最大遗憾与CES的最大遗憾与汇总规则的最大遗憾,并在正确指定或误指定的条件平均治疗效果(CATES)时。我们的理论结果表明,在许多情况下,收缩规则表现良好,这些发现得到了数值实验的进一步支持。具体而言,我们表明,在正确指定CATE的空间时,收缩规则的最大遗憾可能比CES和合并规则的最大遗憾要小。此外,我们发现收缩规则可抵抗CATES空间的错误指定。最后,我们将方法应用于《国家职业培训合作法》研究的实验数据。

This study examines the problem of determining whether to treat individuals based on observed covariates. The most common decision rule is the conditional empirical success (CES) rule proposed by Manski (2004), which assigns individuals to treatments that yield the best experimental outcomes conditional on the observed covariates. Conversely, using shrinkage estimators, which shrink unbiased but noisy preliminary estimates toward the average of these estimates, is a common approach in statistical estimation problems because it is well-known that shrinkage estimators may have smaller mean squared errors than unshrunk estimators. Inspired by this idea, we propose a computationally tractable shrinkage rule that selects the shrinkage factor by minimizing an upper bound of the maximum regret. Then, we compare the maximum regret of the proposed shrinkage rule with those of the CES and pooling rules when the space of conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) is correctly specified or misspecified. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the shrinkage rule performs well in many cases and these findings are further supported by numerical experiments. Specifically, we show that the maximum regret of the shrinkage rule can be strictly smaller than those of the CES and pooling rules in certain cases when the space of CATEs is correctly specified. In addition, we find that the shrinkage rule is robust against misspecification of the space of CATEs. Finally, we apply our method to experimental data from the National Job Training Partnership Act Study.

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