Given two possible treatments, there may exist subgroups who benefit greater
from one treatment than the other. This problem is relevant to the field of
marketing, where treatments may correspond to different ways of selling a
product. It is similarly relevant to the field of public policy, where
treatments may correspond to specific government programs. And finally,
personalized medicine is a field wholly devoted to understanding which
subgroups of individuals will benefit from particular medical treatments. We
present a computationally fast tree-based method, ABtree, for treatment effect
differentiation. Unlike other methods, ABtree specifically produces decision
rules for optimal treatment assignment on a per-individual basis. The treatment
choices are selected for maximizing the overall occurrence of a desired binary
outcome, conditional on a set of covariates. In this poster, we present the
methodology on tree growth and pruning, and show performance results when
applied to simulated data as well as real data.