Recovering Counterfactual Distributions via Wasserstein GANs

Xinran Liu

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Standard Distributional Synthetic Controls (DSC) estimate counterfactual distributions by minimizing the Euclidean $L_2$ distance between quantile functions. We demonstrate that this geometric reliance renders estimators fragile: they lack informative gradients under support mismatch and produce structural artifacts when outcomes are multimodal. This paper proposes a robust estimator grounded in Optimal Transport (OT). We construct the synthetic control by minimizing the Wasserstein-1 distance between probability measures, implemented via a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN). We establish the formal point identification of synthetic weights under an affine independence condition on the donor pool. Monte Carlo simulations confirm that while standard estimators exhibit catastrophic variance explosions under heavy-tailed contamination and support mismatch, our WGAN-based approach remains consistent and stable. Furthermore, we show that our measure-based method correctly recovers complex bimodal mixtures where traditional quantile averaging fails structurally.

Date: 2026-01
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