Assessing Treatment Effect Variation in Observational Studies: Results from a Data Challenge

Understand

A growing number of methods aim to assess the challenging question of treatment effect variation in observational studies.

• This special section of "Observational Studies" reports the results of a workshop conducted at the 2018 Atlantic Causal Inference Conference designed to understand the similarities and differences across these methods.
• We invited eight groups of researchers to analyze a synthetic observational data set that was generated using a recent large-scale randomized trial in education.
• Overall, participants employed a diverse set of methods, ranging from matching and flexible outcome modeling to semiparametric estimation and ensemble approaches.