Abstract

In many domains, we are interested in estimating the total causal treatment effect in the presence of network interference, where the outcome of one individual or unit is affected by the treatment assignment of those in its local network. Additional challenges arise when complex cluster randomized designs are not feasible to implement, or the network is unknown and costly to estimate. We propose a new measure of model complexity that characterizes the difficulty of estimating the total treatment effect under the standard A/B testing setup. We provide a class of unbiased estimators whose variance is optimal with respect to the population size and the treatment budget. Furthermore, we show that when the network is completely unknown, we can still estimate the total treatment effect under a richer yet simple staggered rollout experimental design. The proposed design principles, and related estimator, work with a broad class of outcome models. Our solution and statistical guarantees do not rely on restrictive network properties, allowing for highly connected networks that may not be easily clustered. This is joint work with Edoardo Airoldi, Christian Borgs, Jennifer Chayes, Mayleen Cortez, and Matthew Eichhorn