Causal Inference in Python Blog

Causal Inference in Python, or Causalinference in short, is a software package that implements various statistical and econometric methods used in the field variously known as Causal Inference, Program Evaluation, or Treatment Effect Analysis.

Through a series of blog posts on this page, I will illustrate the use of Causalinference, as well as provide high-level summaries of the underlying econometric theory with the non-specialist audience in mind. Source code for the package can be found at its GitHub page, and detailed documentation is available at causalinferenceinpython.org.

Trimming

When there is indication of covariate imbalance, we may wish to construct a sample where the treatment and control groups are more similar than the original full sample. One way of doing so is by dropping units with extreme values of propensity scores...

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Matching

One way to overcome the problem of excessive extrapolation of least squares involves directly executing on the unconfoundedness assumption and nonparametrically matching subjects with similar covariate values together. As we shall see, least squares still plays an important role under this approach, but its scope is restricted to being a local one...

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Least Squares

One of the simplest treatment effect estimators is the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator. Below we illustrate several common specifications that can be computed by Causalinference, and describe why least squares can behave poorly when there is not enough covariate overlap...

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Balance

Continuing with the simulated data set from the previous post, in this post we will look at some basic summary statistics, as well as assess the degree of covariate balance between the treatment and control groups...

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Example

To better illustrate some of the methods to be introduced presently, in this post we consider a simulated data set that exhibits a certain level of nonlinearity and covariate imbalance. In particular, consider the data generating process described below...

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