IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rtv/ceisrp/546.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Aggregation Trees

Author

Abstract

Uncovering the heterogeneous effects of particular policies or "treatments" is a key concern for researchers and policymakers. A common approach is to report average treatment effects across different subgroups based on observable covariates. However, there is likely to be considerable uncertainty about the appropriate grouping. This paper proposes a nonparametric approach to discovering heterogeneous subgroups in a selection-on-observables framework. The approach constructs a sequence of groupings, one for each level of granularity. Groupings are nested and feature an optimality property. An "honesty" condition allows us to construct valid confidence intervals for the average treatment effect of each group. The utility of the proposed methodology is illustrated through an empirical exercise that revisits the impact of maternal smoking on birth weight.

Suggested Citation

  • Riccardo Di Francesco, 2022. "Aggregation Trees," CEIS Research Paper 546, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 20 Nov 2023.
    • Handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:546
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ceistorvergata.it/RePEc/rpaper/RP546.pdf
    File Function: Main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sokbae Lee & Ryo Okui & Yoon†Jae Whang, 2017. "Doubly robust uniform confidence band for the conditional average treatment effect function," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(7), pages 1207-1225, November.
    2. Victor Chernozhukov & Denis Chetverikov & Mert Demirer & Esther Duflo & Christian Hansen & Whitney Newey & James Robins, 2018. "Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 21(1), pages 1-68, February.
    3. Shuai Chen & Lu Tian & Tianxi Cai & Menggang Yu, 2017. "A general statistical framework for subgroup identification and comparative treatment scoring," Biometrics, The International Biometric Society, vol. 73(4), pages 1199-1209, December.
    4. Stefan Wager & Susan Athey, 2018. "Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 113(523), pages 1228-1242, July.
    5. Lechner, Michael & Wunsch, Conny, 2013. "Sensitivity of matching-based program evaluations to the availability of control variables," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 111-121.
    6. Michael C Knaus & Michael Lechner & Anthony Strittmatter, 2021. "Machine learning estimation of heterogeneous causal effects: Empirical Monte Carlo evidence," The Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 24(1), pages 134-161.
    7. Lu Tian & Ash A. Alizadeh & Andrew J. Gentles & Robert Tibshirani, 2014. "A Simple Method for Estimating Interactions Between a Treatment and a Large Number of Covariates," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 109(508), pages 1517-1532, December.
    8. Toru Kitagawa & Aleksey Tetenov, 2021. "Equality-Minded Treatment Choice," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(2), pages 561-574, March.
    9. Douglas Almond & Kenneth Y. Chay & David S. Lee, 2005. "The Costs of Low Birth Weight," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(3), pages 1031-1083.
    10. Susan Athey & Guido W. Imbens, 2017. "The State of Applied Econometrics: Causality and Policy Evaluation," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 31(2), pages 3-32, Spring.
    11. Cotterman, R & Peracchi, F, 1992. "Classification and Aggregation: An Application to Industrial Classification in CPS Data," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 7(1), pages 31-51, Jan.-Marc.
    12. Jason Abrevaya & Yu-Chin Hsu & Robert P. Lieli, 2015. "Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(4), pages 485-505, October.
    13. Huber, Martin & Lechner, Michael & Wunsch, Conny, 2013. "The performance of estimators based on the propensity score," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 175(1), pages 1-21.
    14. Qingliang Fan & Yu-Chin Hsu & Robert P. Lieli & Yichong Zhang, 2022. "Estimation of Conditional Average Treatment Effects With High-Dimensional Data," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(1), pages 313-327, January.
    15. Friedman, Jerome H. & Hastie, Trevor & Tibshirani, Rob, 2010. "Regularization Paths for Generalized Linear Models via Coordinate Descent," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 33(i01).
    16. Michael Zimmert & Michael Lechner, 2019. "Nonparametric estimation of causal heterogeneity under high-dimensional confounding," Papers 1908.08779, arXiv.org.
    17. Imbens,Guido W. & Rubin,Donald B., 2015. "Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521885881.
    18. Qingyuan Zhao & Trevor Hastie, 2021. "Causal Interpretations of Black-Box Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(1), pages 272-281, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Michael C Knaus & Michael Lechner & Anthony Strittmatter, 2021. "Machine learning estimation of heterogeneous causal effects: Empirical Monte Carlo evidence," The Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 24(1), pages 134-161.
    2. Phillip Heiler & Michael C. Knaus, 2021. "Effect or Treatment Heterogeneity? Policy Evaluation with Aggregated and Disaggregated Treatments," Papers 2110.01427, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2023.
    3. Michael Lechner & Jana Mareckova, 2022. "Modified Causal Forest," Papers 2209.03744, arXiv.org.
    4. Lechner, Michael, 2018. "Modified Causal Forests for Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects," IZA Discussion Papers 12040, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Michael C Knaus, 2022. "Double machine learning-based programme evaluation under unconfoundedness [Econometric methods for program evaluation]," The Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 25(3), pages 602-627.
    6. Ganesh Karapakula, 2023. "Stable Probability Weighting: Large-Sample and Finite-Sample Estimation and Inference Methods for Heterogeneous Causal Effects of Multivalued Treatments Under Limited Overlap," Papers 2301.05703, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2023.
    7. Michael Zimmert & Michael Lechner, 2019. "Nonparametric estimation of causal heterogeneity under high-dimensional confounding," Papers 1908.08779, arXiv.org.
    8. Gabriel Okasa, 2022. "Meta-Learners for Estimation of Causal Effects: Finite Sample Cross-Fit Performance," Papers 2201.12692, arXiv.org.
    9. Michael Lechner, 2023. "Causal Machine Learning and its use for public policy," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, Springer;Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, vol. 159(1), pages 1-15, December.
    10. Goller, Daniel & Lechner, Michael & Moczall, Andreas & Wolff, Joachim, 2020. "Does the estimation of the propensity score by machine learning improve matching estimation? The case of Germany's programmes for long term unemployed," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    11. Daniel Goller, 2023. "Analysing a built-in advantage in asymmetric darts contests using causal machine learning," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 325(1), pages 649-679, June.
    12. Goller, Daniel & Harrer, Tamara & Lechner, Michael & Wolff, Joachim, 2021. "Active labour market policies for the long-term unemployed: New evidence from causal machine learning," Economics Working Paper Series 2108, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    13. Daniel Jacob, 2019. "Group Average Treatment Effects for Observational Studies," Papers 1911.02688, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2020.
    14. Zimmert, Franziska & Zimmert, Michael, 2020. "Paid parental leave and maternal reemployment: Do part-time subsidies help or harm?," Economics Working Paper Series 2002, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    15. Harsh Parikh & Carlos Varjao & Louise Xu & Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, 2022. "Validating Causal Inference Methods," Papers 2202.04208, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2022.
    16. Nora Bearth & Michael Lechner, 2024. "Causal Machine Learning for Moderation Effects," Papers 2401.08290, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2024.
    17. Susan Athey & Guido W. Imbens & Jonas Metzger & Evan M. Munro, 2019. "Using Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks for the Design of Monte Carlo Simulations," NBER Working Papers 26566, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Davide Viviano & Jelena Bradic, 2019. "Synthetic learner: model-free inference on treatments over time," Papers 1904.01490, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2022.
    19. Kyle Colangelo & Ying-Ying Lee, 2019. "Double debiased machine learning nonparametric inference with continuous treatments," CeMMAP working papers CWP54/19, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    20. Yiyi Huo & Yingying Fan & Fang Han, 2023. "On the adaptation of causal forests to manifold data," Papers 2311.16486, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2023.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Causality; conditional average treatment effects; recursive partitioning; subgroups discovery; subgroup analysis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C29 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Other
    • C45 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Neural Networks and Related Topics
    • C55 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Large Data Sets: Modeling and Analysis

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:546. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Barbara Piazzi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csrotit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.