Causal analysis at extreme quantiles with application to London traffic flow data

Abstract

Transport engineers employ various interventions to enhance traffic-network performance. Quantifying the impacts of Cycle Superhighways is complicated due to the non-random assignment of such an intervention over the transport network. Treatment effects on asymmetric and heavy-tailed distributions are better reflected at extreme tails rather than at the median. We propose a novel method to estimate the treatment effect at extreme tails incorporating heavy-tailed features in the outcome distribution. The analysis of London transport data using the proposed method indicates that the extreme traffic flow increased substantially after Cycle Superhighways came into operation.