Data-Driven Uniform Inference for General Continuous Treatment Models via Minimum-Variance Weighting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonparametric, data-driven method for estimating general continuous dose-response functions using minimum-variance weights, providing uniform confidence bands and demonstrating effectiveness through simulations and real data.

Contribution

It develops a stable, closed-form weighting scheme for nonparametric dose-response estimation, enabling efficient inference with uniform confidence bands.

Findings

Weights have minimum sample variance.

Uniform confidence bands are valid and data-driven.

Method performs well in simulations and real data applications.

Abstract

Ai et al. (2021) studied the estimation of a general dose-response function (GDRF) of a continuous treatment that includes the average dose-response function, the quantile dose-response function, and other expectiles of the dose-response distribution. They specified the GDRF as a parametric function of the treatment status only and proposed a weighted regression with the weighting function estimated using the maximum entropy approach. This paper specifies the GDRF as a nonparametric function of the treatment status, proposes a weighted local linear regression for estimating GDRF, and develops a bootstrap procedure for constructing the uniform confidence bands. We propose stable weights with minimum sample variance while eliminating the sample association between the treatment and the confounding variables. The proposed weights admit a closed-form expression, allowing them to be computed efficiently in the bootstrap sampling. Under certain conditions, we derive the uniform Bahadur representation for the proposed estimator of GDRF and establish the validity of the corresponding uniform confidence bands. A fully data-driven approach to choosing the undersmooth tuning parameters and a data-driven bias-control confidence band are included. A simulation study and an application demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.