Foundations of Data Science Seminar Series

Speaker: Daniel A. Spielman
Sterling Professor of Computer Science, Professor Statistics and Data Science and of Mathematics 
Director, Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science

“Balancing covariates in randomized experiments”

Abstract: In randomized experiments, we randomly assign the treatment that each experimental subject receives. Randomization can help us accurately estimate the difference in treatment effects with high probability. It also helps ensure that the groups of subjects receiving each treatment are similar. If we have already measured characteristics of our subjects that we think could influence their response to treatment, then we can increase the precision of our estimates of treatment effects by balancing those characteristics between the groups.  We show how to use the recently developed Gram-Schmidt Walk algorithm of Bansal, Dadush, Garg, and Lovett to efficiently assign treatments to subjects in a way that balances known characteristics without sacrificing the benefits of randomization. These allow us to obtain more accurate estimates of treatment effects to the extent that the measured characteristics are predictive of treatment effects, while also bounding the worst-case behavior when they are not.  

This is joint work with Chris Harshaw, Fredrik Sävje, and Peng Zhang.

This is an in-person presentation, but it is accessible remotely here: 

https://yale.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=8bfb6d8c-bf6d-40bc-9f8f-af1c0125e9a6

.