Causal rule ensemble method for estimating heterogeneous treatment effect with consideration of main effects

Abstract: This study proposes a novel framework based on the RuleFit method to estimate Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) in a randomized clinical trial. To achieve this, we adopted S-learner of the metaalgorithm for our proposed framework. The proposed method incorporates a rule term for the main effect and treatment effect, which allows HTE to be interpretable form of rule. By including a main effect term in the proposed model, the selected rule is represented as an HTE that excludes other effects. We confirmed a performance equivalent to that of another ensemble learning methods through numerical simulation and demonstrated the interpretation of the proposed method from a real data application.