Understanding treatment effect heterogeneity is crucial for reliable decision-making in treatment evaluation and selection. The conditional average treatment effect (CATE) is widely used to capture treatment effect heterogeneity induced by observed covariates and to design individualized treatment policies. However, it is an average metric within subpopulations, which prevents it from revealing individual-level risks, potentially leading to misleading results. This article fills this gap by examining individual risk for binary outcomes, specifically focusing on the fraction negatively affected (FNA), a metric that quantifies the percentage of individuals experiencing worse outcomes under treatment compared with control. Even under the strong ignorability assumption, FNA is still unidentifiable, and the existing Frechet-Hoeffding bounds are usually too wide and attainable only under extreme data-generating processes. By invoking mild conditions on the value range of the Pearson correlation coefficient between potential outcomes, we obtain improved bounds compared with the Frechet-Hoeffding bounds. We show that paradoxically, even with a positive CATE, the lower bound on FNA can be positive, i.e., in the best-case scenario, many individuals will be harmed if they receive treatment. Additionally, we establish a nonparametric sensitivity analysis framework for FNA using the Pearson correlation coefficient as the sensitivity parameter. Furthermore,we propose nonparametric estimators for the refined FNA bounds and prove their consistency and asymptotic normality. Finally, we extend our method to the setting of reinforcement learning.
吴鹏,北京工商大学副教授,博士生导师,创新书院副院长,优秀研究生指导教师。2020博士毕业于北京师范大学,2020-2022在北京大学国际数学研究中心从事博士后研究工作;2022.07至今在北京工商大学数学与统计学院任职。研究方向为因果推断、可信人工智能、推荐系统、医疗决策。顶会NeurIPS、ICML、ICLR领域主席(Area Chair)。在JRSSB、JASA、Sinica等统计学期刊以及NeurIPS、ICML、ICLR等计算机会议发表论文50余篇。主持国自然青年基金、重点研发计划子课题、横向(字节跳动)项目。