# assign_treatment

0th

Percentile

##### Min MSE Treatment Assignment

Computes the treatment assignment vector according to available data (observable characteristics, covariate vectors) given about the units (individuals or clusters, such as schools, hospitals, ...). Consider using the user-friendly wrapper function assignMinMSETreatment.

Keywords
treatment, optim, Assignment, MSE
##### Usage
assign_treatment(current_data,
prev_treatment = NULL,
n_treatments = 1,
iterations = 50,
change = 3,
cooling = 1,
t0 = 10,
tmax = 10,
built_in = 0,
plot = 0,
create_plot_file = 1)
##### Arguments
current_data

a dataframe containing the covariate vectors for each attribute. If the values are missing or on different scales, please use assignMinMSETreatment, which automatically scales the data.

prev_treatment

takes a numerical vector of partial treatment assignment as argument, and assigns the missing units (where the value is NA) to a treatment group while minimizing the objective function. Non-missing values are copied to the new vector, i.e., treatment group assignment of these observations is unaffected, but taken into consideration for achieving balanced treatment groups.

n_treatments

specifies the number of treatment groups desired (in addition to the control group); minimum and default value is n_treatments = 1.

iterations

specifies the number of iterations the algorithm performs; the default value is iterations = 50. Depending on the number of units and the number of covariates to consider for group assignment, a high value could result in a long run-time.

change

sets the number of units to exchange treatment in each iteration; the default value is change = 3. In case of big datasets (e.g., with more than 100 units), one might consider increasing the default value.

cooling

specifies the cooling scheme for the simulated annealing algorithm to use. cooling = 1, which is the default scheme, sets the temperature to $$t0/log(floor((k - 1)/tmax ) * tmax + exp(1)),$$ whereas cooling = 2 sets the temperature to the faster decreasing sequence $$t0 /(floor((k - 1)/tmax) * tmax + 1).$$ In praxis, cooling schemes are mostly of one of these forms. One might want to change the cooling scheme if the plot indicates a too slow decrease of objective values. For a theoretical discussion of cooling schemes, see Belisle (see 1992, p. 890).

t0

sets the starting temperature for the simulated annealing algorithm, see Belisle (1992) for theoretical convergence considerations. In praxis, a lower starting temperature t0 decreases the acceptance rate of a worse solution more rapidly. Specifying a negative number allows values proportional to the objective function, i.e. t0 = -5 sets the starting temperature to 1/5 of the objective function for the starting point, and thus - for the first tmax iterations of the algorithm - the difference of the old and the proposed solution is scaled by 1/5. When changing the default value, it should be considered that also worse solutions have to be accepted in order for the algorithm to escape a local minimum, so it should be chosen high enough. The default value is t0 = 10.

tmax

specifies the number of function evaluations at each temperature: For instance, tmax = 10 makes the algorithm evaluate 10 treatment assignments that are found based on the current solution, before the temperature is decreased and thus the probability of accepting a worse solution is decreased. The default value is tmax = 10.

built_in

if built_in = 1 the R built-in function optim with method 'SANN' (Simulated ANNealing) will be used to optimize the function. Otherwise, if built_in = 0, our implementation of the simulated annealing will be used. The function built_in = 0 uses our first cooling function and this cannot be changed. To use the second cooling function, set built_in = 0. All the other parameters, such as iterations, change, t0, tmax are taken into account.

plot

can be used to draw a plot showing the value of the objective function for the a percentage of the iterations by setting plot = 1. The default setting is plot = 0, which suppresses the plot.

create_plot_file

Used to overwrite the plot file, in case there already exists one. It should only be 1 (true) when this method is called without the wrapper assignMinMSETreatment. This method alone is not capable of plotting, but it will create an auxiliary file that contains the information for plotting. To include plotting, use assignMinMSETreatment with desired_test_vectors = 1.

##### Note

With the default setting of plotting and using the trace output, the program writes to different files. To avoid this, set plot = 0 and trace_output = 0. For the built-in function optim, the trace output is necessary for printing, because we pipe the output of the program to a file to obtain the intermediate values of the optimization function.

##### References

ginv, optim

##### Aliases
• assign_treatment
##### Examples
# NOT RUN {
input <- data.frame(c(10, 20, 30, 40, 130, 40, 120, 5, 10, 80),
c(2, 6, 2, 8, 1, 10, 9, 8, 7, 5),
c(1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 1, 0))
colnames(input) <- c("IQ", "grade_maths", "both_parents")

assign_treatment(input,
prev_treatment = c(0, NA, NA, NA, 1, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA),
n_treatments = 2,
iterations = 100,
built_in = 0,
plot = 0)
# }

Documentation reproduced from package minMSE, version 0.1.1, License: GNU General Public License

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