Pair-switching rerandomization

Abstract

Rerandomization discards assignments with covariates unbalanced in the treatment and control groups to improve the estimation and inference efficiency. However, the acceptance-rejection sampling method used by rerandomization is computationally inefficient. As a result, it is time-consuming for classical rerandomization to draw numerous independent assignments, which are necessary for constructing Fisher randomization tests. To address this problem, we propose a pair-switching rerandomization method to draw balanced assignments much efficiently. We show that the difference-in-means estimator is unbiased for the average treatment effect and the Fisher randomization tests are valid under pair-switching rerandomization. In addition, our method is applicable in both non-sequentially and sequentially randomized experiments. We conduct comprehensive simulation studies to compare the finite-sample performances of the proposed method and classical rerandomization. Simulation results indicate that pair-switching rerandomization leads to comparable power of Fisher randomization tests and is 4-18 times faster than classical rerandomization. Finally, we apply the pair-switching rerandomization method to analyze two clinical trial data sets, both demonstrating the advantages of our method