AVERAGING ESTIMATORS OF HETEROGENEOUS TREATMENT EFFECTS UNDER ADDITIVE MODELS

We consider spline-based additive models for estimation of conditional treatment effects. To handle the uncertainty due to variable selection, we propose a method of model averaging with weights obtained by minimizing a J -fold cross-validation criterion, in which a nearest neighbor matching is used to approximate the unobserved potential outcomes. We show that the proposed method is asymptotically optimal in the sense of achieving the lowest possible squared loss in some settings and assigning all weight to the correctly specified models if such models exist in the candidate set. Moreover, consistency properties of the optimal weights and model averaging estimators are established. A simulation study and an empirical example demonstrate the superiority of the proposed estimator over other methods.