 Estimating the Long-Term Effects of Novel TreatmentsKeith Battocchi, Eleanor Dillon, Maggie Hei, Greg Lewis, Miruna Oprescu and Vasilis Syrgkanis Abstract: Policy makers typically face the problem of wanting to estimate the long-term effects of novel treatments, while only having historical data of older treatment options. We assume access to a long-term dataset where only past treatments were administered and a short-term dataset where novel treatments have been administered. We propose a surrogate based approach where we assume that the long-term effect is channeled through a multitude of available short-term proxies. Our work combines three major recent techniques in the causal machine learning literature: surrogate indices, dynamic treatment effect estimation and double machine learning, in a unified pipeline. We show that our method is consistent and provides root-n asymptotically normal estimates under a Markovian assumption on the data and the observational policy. We use a data-set from a major corporation that includes customer investments over a three year period to create a semi-synthetic data distribution where the major qualitative properties of the real dataset are preserved. We evaluate the performance of our method and discuss practical challenges of deploying our formal methodology and how to address them. Date: 2021-03, Revised 2022-02 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2103.08390 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Papers from arXiv.org |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.