2020/04/02 by Eli Sherman, David Arbour, Sherman, Eli +3
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Advanced Causal Inference Techniques #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Methodology (stat.ME) #Statistical Methods and Inference
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.01218
openalex publication_date 2020/04/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In many applied fields, researchers are often interested in tailoring treatments to unit-level characteristics in order to optimize an outcome of interest. Methods for identifying and estimating treatment policies are the subject of the dynamic treatment regime literature. Separately, in many settings the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed does not hold due to inter-subject dependence. The phenomenon where a subject's outcome is dependent on his neighbor's exposure is known as interference. These areas intersect in myriad real-world settings. In this paper we consider the problem of identifying optimal treatment policies in the presence of interference. Using a general representation of interference, via Lauritzen-Wermuth-Freydenburg chain graphs (Lauritzen and Richardson, 2002), we formalize a variety of policy interventions under interference and extend existing identification theory (Tian, 2008; Sherman and Shpitser, 2018). Finally, we illustrate the efficacy of policy maximization under interference in a simulation study.