Metalearners for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects using machine learning

Significance Estimating and analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects is timely, yet challenging. We introduce a unifying framework for many conditional average treatment effect estimators, and we propose a metalearner, the X-learner, which can adapt to structural properties, such as the smoothness and sparsity of the underlying treatment effect. We present its favorable properties, using theory and simulations. We apply it, using random forests, to two field experiments in political science, where it is shown to be easy to use and to produce results that are interpretable.