Abstract:We study causal effect estimation with compositional treatments, where the exposure lies on a simplex and the estimand is defined over compositions rather than scalar or binary values. By considering a projection of the average potential outcome onto the treatment space, a kernel-based covariate functional balancing approach is adopted for weight construction. The weights are obtained by directly minimizing a worst-case balancing error over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) defined on the joint space of treatments and covariates, instead of being estimated under a treatment assignment model. Building on these weights, an augmented weighted estimator (AWE) is proposed, where the outcome function is estimated via kernel ridge regression and combined with a marginal augmentation over the covariate distribution. Despite the complex structure of the resulting objective, a finite-dimensional convex optimization problem is formulated via a representer theorem and a low-rank approximation. The proposed estimator achieves $\sqrt{n}$-consistency without requiring consistent estimation or smoothness of the weights. An asymptotic normality result is established around a sample-specific target. Empirical performance is demonstrated through simulation studies and a real data application.
From: Sungbum Kim [view email]
[v1]
Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:24:58 UTC (211 KB)
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。