Learning heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) is an important problem across many fields. Most existing methods consider the setting with a single treatment arm and a single outcome metric. However, in many real world domains, experiments are run consistently - for example, in internet companies, A/B tests are run every day to measure the impacts of potential changes across many different metrics of interest. We show that even if an analyst cares only about the HTEs in one experiment for one metric, precision can be improved greatly by analyzing all of the data together to take advantage of cross-experiment and cross-outcome metric correlations. We formalize this idea in a tensor factorization framework and propose a simple and scalable model which we refer to as the low rank or LR-learner. Experiments in both synthetic and real data suggest that the LR-learner can be much more precise than independent HTE estimation.
翻译:学习不同治疗效果(HTEs)是许多领域的一个重要问题。大多数现有方法都考虑用单一的处理臂和单一的结果度量来设定标准。然而,在许多现实世界领域,实验是一贯的,例如,在互联网公司中,A/B测试每天都在进行,以测量许多不同标准的潜在变化的影响。我们表明,即使分析师在一次试验中只用一个指标来关注HTE,但如果将所有数据一起分析,以利用交叉试验和交叉结果度量度相关关系,精确度可以大大提高。我们把这个概念正式化为一个分数因素化框架,并提出一个简单和可扩展的模式,我们称之为低等级或LR-learner。合成和真实数据的实验表明,LR-learner比独立的HTE估计要精确得多。