Almost-Matching-Exactly for Treatment Effect Estimation under Network Interference

M. Usaid Awan, Marco Morucci, Vittorio Orlandi, Sudeepa Roy, Cynthia Rudin, Alexander Volfovsky

Abstract: We propose a matching method that recovers direct treatment effects from randomized experiments where units are connected in an observed network, and units that share edges can potentially influence each others' outcomes. Traditional treatment effect estimators for randomized experiments are biased and error prone in this setting. Our method matches units almost exactly on counts of unique subgraphs within their neighborhood graphs. The matches that we construct are interpretable and high-quality. Our method can be extended easily to accommodate additional unit-level covariate information. We show empirically that our method performs better than other existing methodologies for this problem, while producing meaningful, interpretable results.