Quantile treatment effect estimation with dimension reduction

Abstract

Quantile treatment effects can be important causal estimands in evaluation of biomedical treatments or interventions for health outcomes such as medical cost and utilisation. We consider their estimation in observational studies with many possible covariates under the assumption that treatment and potential outcomes are independent conditional on all covariates. To obtain valid and efficient treatment effect estimators, we replace the set of all covariates by lower dimensional sets for estimation of the quantiles of potential outcomes. These lower dimensional sets are obtained using sufficient dimension reduction tools and are outcome specific. We justify our choice from efficiency point of view. We prove the asymptotic normality of our estimators and our theory is complemented by some simulation results and an application to data from the University of Wisconsin Health Accountable Care Organization.