Balance-Guided Forest for Causal Effect Estimation

arXiv:2611.05723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Covariate balancing is widely used for estimating causal effects in observational studies. A central challenge is determining which covariate features should be balanced. Forest-kernel balancing provides a data-driven way to learn informative balancing features. Existing forest-kernel balancing methods first learn a tree-based representation and then construct balancing weights. However, this procedure creates a mismatch, as limited tree capacity may be spent on features that are already well represented. We propose Balance-Guided Forest (BGF), which uses the current balancing weights to guide subsequent tree construction. BGF grows trees using a novel splitting score that combines residual imbalance with an outcome contrast, favoring splits that separate outcome-relevant regions where imbalance remains. This couples representation learning with covariate balancing rather than treating balancing as a downstream step. We establish an oracle-type bound that links the iterative construction to weighting error and causal bias. Simulations exhibit improvements in causal estimation relative to existing forest-kernel approaches. Real-data applications illustrate the practical behavior of BGF across observational studies.