Good Allocations from Bad Estimates

Conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation is the de facto gold standard for targeting a treatment to a heterogeneous population. The method estimates treatment effects up to an error ε > 0 in each of M different strata of the population, targeting individuals in decreasing order of estimated treatment effect until the budget runs out. In general, this method requires O(M/ε2) samples. This is best possible if the goal is to estimate all treatment effects up to an ε error. In this work, we show how to achieve the same total treatment effect as CATE with only O(M/ε) samples for natural distributions of treatment effects. The key insight is that coarse estimates suffice for near-optimal treatment allocations. In addition, we show that budget flexibility can further reduce the sample complexity of allocation. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on various real-world RCT datasets. In all cases, it finds nearly optimal treatment allocations with surprisingly few samples. Our work highlights the fundamental distinction between treatment effect estimation and treatment allocation: the latter requires far fewer samples.