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Enabling Decision Making with the Modified Causal Forest: Policy Trees for Treatment Assignment
oleh: Hugo Bodory, Federica Mascolo, Michael Lechner
| Format: | Article |
|---|---|
| Diterbitkan: | MDPI AG 2024-07-01 |
Deskripsi
Decision making plays a pivotal role in shaping outcomes across various disciplines, such as medicine, economics, and business. This paper provides practitioners with guidance on implementing a decision tree designed to optimise treatment assignment policies through an interpretable and non-parametric algorithm. Building upon the method proposed by Zhou, Athey, and Wager (2023), our policy tree introduces three key innovations: a different approach to policy score calculation, the incorporation of constraints, and enhanced handling of categorical and continuous variables. These innovations enable the evaluation of a broader class of policy rules, all of which can be easily obtained using a single module. We showcase the effectiveness of our policy tree in managing multiple, discrete treatments using datasets from diverse fields. Additionally, the policy tree is implemented in the open-source Python package <i>mcf</i> (modified causal forest), facilitating its application in both randomised and observational research settings.