# GCF: Generalized Causal Forest for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation in Online Marketplace

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10975 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10975/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Meta-learners for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03461/) (2017)
- [Generalized Random Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01271/) (2016)
- [Discussion on "Bayesian Regression Tree Models for Causal Inference: Regularization, Confounding, and Heterogeneous Effects" by Hahn, Murray and Carvalho](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02836/) (2021)
- [Nonparametric methods for doubly robust estimation of continuous treatment effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00747/) (2015)
- [VCNet and Functional Targeted Regularization For Learning Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07861/) (2021)
- [MLlib: Machine Learning in Apache Spark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.06807/) (2015)
- [Orthogonal Random Forest for Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03467/) (2018)
- [Uplift Modeling with Multiple Treatments and General Response Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08492/) (2017)
- [A unified survey of treatment effect heterogeneity modeling and uplift modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12769/) (2020)
- [Markdowns in E-Commerce Fresh Retail: A Counterfactual Prediction and Multi-Period Optimization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08313/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Explicit Feature Interaction-aware Uplift Network for Online Marketing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00315/) (2023)
- [M3TN: Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts based Multi-valued Treatment Network for Uplift Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14426/) (2024)
- [Jointly Optimizing Debiased CTR and Uplift for Coupons Marketing: A Unified Causal Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12972/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Uplift modeling is a rapidly growing approach that utilizes causal inference and machine learning methods to directly estimate the heterogeneous treatment effects, which has been widely applied to various online marketplaces to assist large-scale decision-making in recent years. The existing popular models, like causal forest (CF), are limited to either discrete treatments or posing parametric assumptions on the outcome-treatment relationship that may suffer model misspecification. However, continuous treatments (e.g., price, duration) often arise in marketplaces. To alleviate these restrictions, we use a kernel-based doubly robust estimator to recover the non-parametric dose-response functions that can flexibly model continuous treatment effects. Moreover, we propose a generic distance-based splitting criterion to capture the heterogeneity for the continuous treatments. We call the proposed algorithm generalized causal forest (GCF) as it generalizes the use case of CF to a much broader setting. We show the effectiveness of GCF by deriving the asymptotic property of the estimator and comparing it to popular uplift modeling methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. We implement GCF on Spark and successfully deploy it into a large-scale online pricing system at a leading ride-sharing company. Online A/B testing results further validate the superiority of GCF.