Overlap in observational studies with high-dimensional covariates
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Publication:2658764
Abstract: Estimating causal effects under exogeneity hinges on two key assumptions: unconfoundedness and overlap. Researchers often argue that unconfoundedness is more plausible when more covariates are included in the analysis. Less discussed is the fact that covariate overlap is more difficult to satisfy in this setting. In this paper, we explore the implications of overlap in observational studies with high-dimensional covariates and formalize curse-of-dimensionality argument, suggesting that these assumptions are stronger than investigators likely realize. Our key innovation is to explore how strict overlap restricts global discrepancies between the covariate distributions in the treated and control populations. Exploiting results from information theory, we derive explicit bounds on the average imbalance in covariate means under strict overlap and show that these bounds become more restrictive as the dimension grows large. We discuss how these implications interact with assumptions and procedures commonly deployed in observational causal inference, including sparsity and trimming.
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Cited in
(17)- Estimating population average causal effects in the presence of non-overlap: the effect of natural gas compressor station exposure on cancer mortality
- The costs and benefits of uniformly valid causal inference with high-dimensional nuisance parameters
- Prior and posterior checking of implicit causal assumptions
- The role of covariate balance in observational studies
- Subgroup analysis and adaptive experiments crave for debiasing
- Benefits and costs of matching prior to a difference in differences analysis when parallel trends does not hold
- Nonparametric identification and estimation of heterogeneous causal effects under conditional independence
- Causal inference of general treatment effects using neural networks with a diverging number of confounders
- Towards optimal doubly robust estimation of heterogeneous causal effects
- Identifying surrogate markers in real-world comparative effectiveness research
- Addressing positivity violations in causal effect estimation using Gaussian process priors
- Semiparametric estimation of long-term treatment effects
- Mahalanobis balancing: a multivariate perspective on approximate covariate balancing
- In Nonparametric and High-Dimensional Models, Bayesian Ignorability is an Informative Prior
- The designed bootstrap for causal inference in big observational data
- More efficient policy learning via optimal retargeting
- Augmented minimax linear estimation
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