Hi all,
Our next virtual meeting will be at 12pm (EST) Wednesday, April 14, where Laura
Forastiere <https://publichealth.yale.edu/profile/laura_forastiere/> (Yale
University) presents "Heterogeneous Treatment and Spillover Effects under
Clustered Network Interference"
*Abstract*:
The bulk of causal inference studies rules out the presence of interference
between units. However, in many real-world scenarios units are
interconnected by social, physical or virtual ties and the effect of a
treatment can spill from one unit to other connected individuals in the
network. In these settings, interference should be taken into account to
avoid biased estimates of the treatment effect, but it can also be
leveraged to save resources and provide the intervention to a lower
percentage of the population where the treatment is more effective and
where the effect can spill over to other susceptible individuals. In fact,
different people might respond differently not only to the treatment
received but also to the treatment received by their network contacts.
Understanding the heterogeneity of treatment and spillover effects can help
policy-makers in the scale-up phase of the intervention, it can guide the
design of targeting strategies with the ultimate goal of making the
interventions more cost-effective, and it might even allow generalizing the
level of treatment spillover effects in other populations. In this paper,
we develop a machine learning method that makes use of tree-based
algorithms and a Horvitz-Thompson estimator to assess the heterogeneity of
treatment and spillover effects with respect to individual, neighborhood
and network characteristics in the context of clustered network
interference. We illustrate how the proposed binary tree methodology
performs in a Monte Carlo simulation study. Additionally, we provide an
application on a randomized experiment aimed at assessing the heterogeneous
effects of information sessions on the uptake of a new weather insurance
policy in rural China.
*Zoom link*:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97787602526?pwd=Uzh3bVVVS0F4TEVYQTJlV3BQNjcydz09
*Schedule of the workshop*:
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009
Looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!
Best,
Soichiro
--
Soichiro Yamauchi
PhD candidate
Harvard University
URL:
https://soichiroy.github.io/