Really Doing Great at Estimating CATE? A Critical Look at ML Benchmarking Practices in Treatment Effect Estimation

Alicia Curth, David Svensson, Jim Weatherall, Mihaela van der Schaar

Keywords: Treatment effect heterogeneity, Causal Inference, Benchmarking

TL;DR: We argue that CATE estimator benchmarking results based on popular semi-synthetic datasets should be interpreted more carefully, and discuss alternatives to current practice.

Abstract: The machine learning (ML) toolbox for estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data is expanding rapidly, yet many of its algorithms have been evaluated only on a very limited set of semi-synthetic benchmark datasets. In this paper, we investigate current benchmarking practices for ML-based conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimators, with special focus on empirical evaluation based on the popular semi-synthetic IHDP benchmark. We identify problems with current practice and highlight that semi-synthetic benchmark datasets, which (unlike real-world benchmarks used elsewhere in ML) do not necessarily reflect properties of real data, can systematically favor some algorithms over others -- a fact that is rarely acknowledged but of immense relevance for interpretation of empirical results. Further, we argue that current evaluation metrics evaluate performance only for a small subset of possible use cases of CATE estimators, and discuss alternative metrics relevant for applications in personalized medicine. Additionally, we discuss alternatives for current benchmark datasets, and implications of our findings for benchmarking in CATE estimation.

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