Other events and webinars

REECAP methods workshop on "Machine Learning and Economic Experiments"

March 20th, 2026, 10:00 - 12:00 CET

Presenters: Alessandro Varacca and Hugo Storm

In this workshop, an introduction to and two applications of machine learning for economic experiments will be discussed followed by a question and answer session. 

Hugo will provide an introduction to probabilistic machine learning and a workflow for experimental design, centred on the data-generating process that uses these methods. Key advantages of these approaches are that they allow for testing the entire experiment design and the empirical approach prior to data collection. Additionally, they offer the opportunity to jointly analyse separate parts of the experiment. 

Alessandro will discuss how machine learning methods can be leveraged to estimate treatment effect heterogeneity in experimental studies. While traditional methods typically exploit rigid treatment-covariate interaction terms, this approach can yield unstable results and model misspecification, particularly when the number of interactions grows. Flexible functional forms estimated through machine learning can easily fix these issues and provide a coherent framework to both discover and estimate heterogeneous treatment effects.

Register to attend the webinar