Comprehensive Causal Machine Learning ...

Uncovering causal effects at various levels of granularity provides substantial value to decision makers. Comprehensive machine learning approaches to causal effect estimation allow to use a single causal machine learning approach for estimation and inference of causal mean effects for all levels of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lechner, Michael, Mareckova, Jana
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: arXiv 2024
Subjects:
DML
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2405.10198
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10198
Description
Summary:Uncovering causal effects at various levels of granularity provides substantial value to decision makers. Comprehensive machine learning approaches to causal effect estimation allow to use a single causal machine learning approach for estimation and inference of causal mean effects for all levels of granularity. Focusing on selection-on-observables, this paper compares three such approaches, the modified causal forest (mcf), the generalized random forest (grf), and double machine learning (dml). It also provides proven theoretical guarantees for the mcf and compares the theoretical properties of the approaches. The findings indicate that dml-based methods excel for average treatment effects at the population level (ATE) and group level (GATE) with few groups, when selection into treatment is not too strong. However, for finer causal heterogeneity, explicitly outcome-centred forest-based approaches are superior. The mcf has three additional benefits: (i) It is the most robust estimator in cases when dml-based ... : arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2209.03744 ...