Sensitivity analysis of individual treatment effects: A robust conformal inference approach
Abstract
We propose a model-free framework for sensitivity analysis of individual treatment effects (ITEs), building upon ideas from conformal inference. For any unit, our procedure reports the Γ-value, a number which quantifies the minimum strength of confounding needed to explain away the evidence for ITE. Our approach rests on the reliable predictive inference of counterfactuals and ITEs in situations where the training data are confounded. Under the marginal sensitivity model of [Z. Tan, J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 101, 1619-1637 (2006)], we characterize the shift between the distribution of the observations and that of the counterfactuals. We first develop a general method for predictive inference of test samples from a shifted distribution; we then leverage this to construct covariate-dependent prediction sets for counterfactuals. No matter the value of the shift, these prediction sets (resp. approximately) achieve marginal coverage if the propensity score is known exactly (resp. estimated). We describe a distinct procedure also attaining coverage, however, conditional on the training data. In the latter case, we prove a sharpness result showing that for certain classes of prediction problems, the prediction intervals cannot possibly be tightened. We verify the validity and performance of the methods via simulation studies and apply them to analyze real datasets.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Feb 02, 2023
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.2214889120
Entities
People
- Emmanuel Candès
- Ying Jin
- Zhimei Ren
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- National Institutes of Health
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Naval Research
- Simons Foundation
- Stanford University
- University of Chicago