Causal Inference with High-Dimensional Treatments

Abstract

In this work, we consider causal inference in various high-dimensional treatment settings, including for single multi-valued treatments and vector treatments with binary or continuous components, when the number of treatments can be comparable to or even larger than the number of observations. These settings bring unique challenges: first, the treatment effects of interest are represented by a high-dimensional vector rather than a scalar; second, positivity violations are often unavoidable; and third, estimation can be based on a smaller effective sample size. We first discuss fundamental limits of estimating effects here, showing that consistent estimation is impossible without further assumptions. We go on to propose novel doubly robust estimators for mean potential outcomes of a high-dimensional single multi-valued treatment. We analyze the proposed estimators under sparsity assumptions, giving finite-sample risk bounds and showing that consistent estimation is possible under these conditions. Moreover, we derive minimax lower bounds in a sparse and structure-agnostic model to characterize optimal rates of convergence and show our risk bounds are unimprovable. We then generalize our proposed estimators as a sparse pseudo-outcome regression framework with constrained regression estimators and error guarantees under sparsity, allowing estimation of generic functionals and different types of high-dimensional treatments. We apply the framework to derive estimators of the mean potential outcomes for high-dimensional vector treatments. Finally, we illustrate the proposed methods through a simulation and an empirical application.