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Poster

Conditional Outcome Equivalence: A Quantile Alternative to CATE

Josh Givens · Henry Reeve · Song Liu · Katarzyna Reluga


Abstract:

Conditional quantile treatment effect (CQTE) can provide insight into the effect of a treatment beyond the conditional average treatment effect (CATE). This ability to provide information over multiple quantiles of the response makes CQTE especially valuable in cases where the effect of a treatment is not well-modelled by a location shift, even conditionally on the covariates. Nevertheless, the estimation of CQTE is challenging and depends upon the smoothness of the individual quantiles as a function of the covariates. This is in stark contrast to CATE where it is possible to obtain high-quality estimates where there is less dependency upon the smoothness of the nuisance parameters. We combine the desirable properties of CATE and CQTE by considering a new estimand, the conditional quantile comparator (CQC). The CQC not only retains information about the whole treatment distribution, similar to CQTE, but also leverages simplicity in an auxiliary estimand. We provide finite sample bounds on the error of our estimator, demonstrating its ability to exploit simplicity. We validate our theory in numerical simulations which show that our method produces more accurate estimates than baselines. Finally, we apply our methodology to a study on the effect of employment incentives on earnings across different age groups. We see that our method is able to reveal heterogeneity of the effect across different quantiles.

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