Orthogonal random forest for causal inference

Miruna Oprescu, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Zhiwei Steven Wu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose the orthogonal random forest, an algorithm that combines Neyman-orthogonality to reduce sensitivity with respect to estimation error of nuisance parameters with generalized random forests (Athey et al., 2017)-a flexible non-parametric method for statistical estimation of conditional moment models using random forests. We provide a consistency rate and establish asymptotic normality for our estimator. We show that under mild assumptions on the consistency rate of the nuisance estimator, we can achieve the same error rate as an oracle with a priori knowledge of these nuisance parameters. We show that when the nuisance functions have a locally sparse parametrization, then a local l2-penalized regression achieves the required rate. Wc apply our method to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data with discrete treatments or continuous treatments, and we show that, unlike prior work, our method provably allows to control for a high-dimensional set of variables under standard sparsity conditions. Wc also provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation of our algorithm on both synthetic and real data.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
Pages8655-8696
Number of pages42
ISBN (Electronic)9781510886988
StatePublished - 2019
Event36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019 - Long Beach, United States
Duration: Jun 9 2019Jun 15 2019

Publication series

Name36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019
Volume2019-June

Conference

Conference36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLong Beach
Period6/9/196/15/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 International Machine Learning Society (IMLS).

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