Evaluating Surrogates in Individual Treatment Regimes (2512.00405v1)

Abstract: In many decision-making problems, the primary outcome of interest is costly or time-consuming to observe, prompting the use of surrogate variables to learn individualized treatment rules (ITRs). However, even when a surrogate is strongly correlated with the outcome or satisfies conventional surrogate validity conditions, surrogate-based ITRs may diverge from outcome-optimal decisions - particularly under realistic budget constraints. To address this gap, we develop a framework for evaluating the decision-making value of surrogate endpoints. We introduce three ITR-oriented performance metrics: surrogate regret, which measures the utility loss from using surrogate-based ITRs instead of outcome-optimal ITRs; surrogate gain, which quantifies the benefit of surrogate-based treatment decisions relative to no treatment; and surrogate efficiency, which evaluates improvement over random treatment assignment. We further extend these metrics to budget-constrained settings and propose doubly robust estimators. We establish their asymptotic properties and provide valid statistical inference. Simulation and real data studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Overall, this work offers the first principled framework to rigorously evaluate surrogates, providing a promising pathway toward more efficient decision-making.