AI & Machine Learning

Organizations delivering services through digital technology have the opportunity to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve their products and services.

When training and education are provided through digital technology, it is possible to customize the individual’s experience based on their characteristics as well as their prior interaction with the application. Machine learning methods can be applied to estimate what works for whom, and why. The lab specializes in adapting machine learning methods to focus on heterogeneity in the effect of interventions. Planning experiments with the goal of learning about heterogeneity is another area of interest.

Another area of focus is developing algorithms that are used to improve personalization for digital services. Innovations in machine learning in the last decade have led to improvements in algorithms for making recommendations to individuals about content, and these can be applied to, for example, recommend stories to students in an educational application. Artificial intelligence can be used to “get to know” an individual and adapt the information presented based on previous experience; the lab makes use of methods such as multi-armed bandit algorithms and reinforcement learning to accomplish this.

Many commonly used methods in artificial intelligence are designed for large systems with many users, in environments where mistakes have few consequences. The lab works to customize and improve these algorithms for the context in which we apply them, where the user base may be smaller and mistakes more costly, such as educational applications.

Project Abstracts

Read about a few of the research projects the lab is currently working on.

Academic Publications

Publication Search
Journal Article

Machine Learning Who to Nudge: Causal vs Predictive Targeting in a Field Experiment on Student Financial Aid Renewal

Susan Athey, Niall Keleher, Jann Spiess
Journal of Econometrics January2025
Journal Article

Evaluating Treatment Prioritization Rules via Rank-Weighted Average Treatment Effects

Steve Yadlowsky, Scott Fleming, Nigam Shah, Emma Brunskill, Stefan Wager
Journal of the American Statistical Association October2024
Working Paper

Federated Offline Policy Learning

Aldo Gael Carranza, Susan Athey
October2024
Working Paper

Qini Curves for Multi-Armed Treatment Rules

Erik Sverdrup, Han Wu, Susan Athey, Stefan Wager
October2024

Tools & Tutorials

Explore and apply the tools and tutorials created by the lab.

BalanceHD is a package for estimation of average treatment effects in high dimensions via approximate residual balancing.

CausalTree is a package for building binary regression tree models in two stages focusing on estimating heterogeneous causal treatment effects.

DS-WGAN is a Python package built on PyTorch for using WGANs to simulate from joint and conditional distributions of economic datasets.

Generalized Random Forests Package (GRF Package) is an R package for forest-based statistical estimation and inference. It provides methods for causal effect estimation and a framework to create forests for new statistical tasks, with new features and methods regularly added.

MCPanel is a package that provides functions to fit a low-rank model to a partially observed matrix.

Multi-Armed Qini is a package for policy evaluation using generalized Qini curves: Evaluate data-driven treatment targeting rules for one or more treatment arms over different budget constraints in experimental or observational settings under unconfoundedness.

ParTreat is software for estimating treatment effects in experiments where the outcome distributions may have “fat tails,” i.e., where understanding extremely high or low outcomes is important for policy but analyzing them makes the analysis of experiments very noisy.

PolicyTree is a package that implements the approach of learning optimal policies through doubly robust estimation of policy trees.

Package for implementing methods for providing sufficient representations of categorical variables

Synthdid is a package that implements the synthetic difference in difference estimator for the average treatment effect in panel data.

Torch Choice is a library for flexible, fast choice modeling with PyTorch designed for both estimation and prediction.

This tutorial introduces key concepts in machine learning-based causal inference and is an ongoing project with new chapters uploaded as they are completed. Topics currently covered:

  • Introduction to Machine Learning
  • Average Treatment Effects
  • Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
  • Policy Evaluation
  • Policy Learning

This course is a series of videos designed for any audience looking to learn more about how machine learning can be used to measure the effects of interventions, understand the heterogeneous impact of interventions, and design targeted treatment assignment policies.

Interviews & Thought Leadership

Learn firsthand from researchers and practitioners associated with the lab.

Hastings, founding director of Research Improving People’s Lives, a nonprofit research institute, is turning facts into results by combining high-powered research, policy expertise, and technical know-how to give governments the tools they need to better serve their communities.