Abstract
Inferring causal relationships in observational data is crucial for understanding scientific and social processes. We develop the first statistical machine learning approach for automatically discovering regression discontinuity designs (RDDs), a quasi-experimental setup often used in econometrics. Our method identifies interpretable, localized RDDs in arbitrary dimensional data and can seamlessly compute treatment effects without expert supervision. By applying the technique to a variety of synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate robust performance under adverse conditions including unobserved variables, substantial noise, and model misspecification.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | KDD 2018 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
Pages | 1512-1520 |
Number of pages | 9 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781450355520 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 19 2018 |
Event | 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2018 - London, United Kingdom Duration: Aug 19 2018 → Aug 23 2018 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining |
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Other
Other | 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2018 |
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Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
City | London |
Period | 8/19/18 → 8/23/18 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery.
Keywords
- Natural experiments
- Pattern detection
- Regression discontinuity