Inference on Treatment Effects after Selection among High-Dimensional Controls†.

We propose robust methods for inference about the effect of a treatment variable on a scalar outcome in the presence of very many regressors in a model with possibly non-Gaussian and heteroscedastic disturbances. We allow for the number of regressors to be larger than the sample size. To make inform...

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Publicado en:Review of Economic Studies Vol. 81; no. 2; pp. 608 - 651
Autores principales: Belloni, Alexandre, Chernozhukov, Victor, Hansen, Christian
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Apr2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Apr2014
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      pub: Oxford University Press / USA
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        10.1093/restud/rdt044
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        atl: Inference on Treatment Effects after Selection among High-Dimensional Controls†.
      aug:
        au:
          Belloni, Alexandre
          Chernozhukov, Victor
          Hansen, Christian
        affil:
          Duke University
          MIT
          University of Chicago
      su:
        Confidence intervals
        Sample size (Statistics)
        Statistical hypothesis testing
        Statistical sampling
        Statistical tolerance regions
      sug:
        subj:
          Marketing Research and Public Opinion Polling
          Confidence intervals
          Sample size (Statistics)
          Statistical hypothesis testing
          Statistical sampling
          Statistical tolerance regions
      keyword:
        Average treatment effects
        High-dimensional-sparse regression
        Inference under imperfect model selection
        Lasso
        Orthogonality of estimating equations with respect to nuisance parameters
        Partially linear model
        Treatment effects
        Uniformly valid inference after model selection
        Average treatment effects
        High-dimensional-sparse regression
        Inference under imperfect model selection
        Lasso
        Orthogonality of estimating equations with respect to nuisance parameters
        Partially linear model
        Treatment effects
        Uniformly valid inference after model selection
      ab: We propose robust methods for inference about the effect of a treatment variable on a scalar outcome in the presence of very many regressors in a model with possibly non-Gaussian and heteroscedastic disturbances. We allow for the number of regressors to be larger than the sample size. To make informative inference feasible, we require the model to be approximately sparse; that is, we require that the effect of confounding factors can be controlled for up to a small approximation error by including a relatively small number of variables whose identities are unknown. The latter condition makes it possible to estimate the treatment effect by selecting approximately the right set of regressors. We develop a novel estimation and uniformly valid inference method for the treatment effect in this setting, called the “post-double-selection” method. The main attractive feature of our method is that it allows for imperfect selection of the controls and provides confidence intervals that are valid uniformly across a large class of models. In contrast, standard post-model selection estimators fail to provide uniform inference even in simple cases with a small, fixed number of controls. Thus, our method resolves the problem of uniform inference after model selection for a large, interesting class of models. We also present a generalization of our method to a fully heterogeneous model with a binary treatment variable. We illustrate the use of the developed methods with numerical simulations and an application that considers the effect of abortion on crime rates.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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