Heavy tail robust estimation and inference for average treatment effects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the probability tail properties of Inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimators of the average treatment effect (ATE) when there is limited overlap between the covariate distributions of the treatment and control groups. Under unconfoundedness of treatment assignment conditional on covariates, such limited overlap is manifested in the propensity score for certain units being very close (but not equal) to 0 or 1. This renders IPW estimators possibly heavy tailed, and with a slower than n rate of convergence. Historically estimators are either based on the assumption of strict overlap, i.e., the propensity score is bounded away from 0 and 1; or they truncate the propensity score; or trim observations based on a variety of techniques based on covariate or propensity score values. Trimming or truncation is ultimately based on the covariates, ignoring important information about the inverse probability weighted random variable Z that identifies ATE by E[Z] = ATE. We propose a tail-trimmed IPW estimator whose performance is robust to limited overlap. In terms of the propensity score, which is generally unknown, we plug-in its parametric estimator in the infeasible Z, and then negligibly trim the resulting feasible Z adaptively by its large values. Trimming leads to bias if Z has an asymmetric distribution and an infinite variance, hence we estimate and remove the bias using important improvements on existing theory and methods. Our estimator sidesteps dimensionality, bias and poor correspondence properties associated with trimming by the covariates or propensity score. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that trimming by the covariates or the propensity score requires the removal of a substantial portion of the sample to render a low bias and close to normal estimator, while our estimator has low bias and mean-squared error, and is close to normal, based on the removal of very few sample extremes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it