Assumption-Lean Differential Variance Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The conditional average treatment effect (CATE) is frequently estimated in clinical studies to refute a homogeneous treatment effect hypothesis. Under this regime, all patients making up the population experience identical benefit from a given treatment relative to a comparator. Uncovering heterogeneous treatment effects through inference about the CATE, however, requires that covariates truly modifying the treatment effect be reliably collected at baseline. CATE-based techniques will necessarily fail to detect violations when effect modifiers are omitted from the data due to, for example, resource constraints. Severe measurement error has a similar impact. Clinical decision makers can be misled as a result. To address these limitations, we prove that a practical homogeneous treatment effect hypothesis can be gauged through inference about contrasts of the potential outcomes' variances even when effect modifiers are missing from the data. We derive causal machine learning estimators of these contrasts and study their asymptotic properties. We establish that these estimators are doubly robust and asymptotically linear under mild conditions, permitting formal hypothesis testing about the treatment effect heterogeneity. Numerical experiments demonstrate that these estimators' asymptotic guarantees are approximately achieved in finite-sample randomized and observational study data alike. These inference procedures are then used to detect heterogeneous treatment effects in the re-analysis of randomized controlled trials investigating targeted temperature management in cardiac arrest patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.075 | 0.306 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".