Skip to contentScholarGate
LibraryBookshelfDeskReview StudioAssistant
Sign in
Entropy Balancing/Evidence
Method evidence record

Entropy Balancing

Entropy balancing is a preprocessing method for causal inference that assigns weights to control-group units so that the reweighted control sample matches the treatment group exactly on a chosen set of covariate moments (means, variances, skewness). Introduced by Hainmueller (2012), it replaces trial-and-error propensity-score trimming with a constrained maximum-entropy optimisation that achieves balance in a single step.

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Source record

Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Entropy Balancing for Causal Effects
Taxonomic method record · regression-model / causal-inference
  • Hainmueller, J. (2012). Entropy balancing for causal effects: A multivariate reweighting method to produce balanced samples in observational studies. Political Analysis, 20(1), 25-46. · DOI 10.1093/pan/mpr025
  • Zhao, Q., & Coey, D. (2017). Entropy balancing is doubly robust. Journal of Causal Inference, 5(1). (Working paper version widely cited; see also Zhao & Coey 2018, Stanford GSB Research Paper.) · URL
Open full method

Curated claims

Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.

No curated claims yet

This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.

Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Taxonomic bucketCoarsened Exact Matchingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyDoubly Robust Estimationmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyInverse Probability Weightingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketMatching Estimatormachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.See alsoPropensity Score Matchingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketPropensity Score Weightingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

Evidence status

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

2 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.

Actions

Open method page
ScholarGate

A content-first reference library for research methods — what each one is, how it works, and where it comes from.

Open data (CC-BY)

Explore

  • Library
  • Search the library…
  • Browse by field
  • Fields
  • Journey
  • Compare
  • Which method?

Reference

  • Subjects
  • Atlas
  • Glossary
  • Methodology
  • Philosophy

Your tools

  • Bookshelf
  • Desk
  • Chat

Company

  • About
  • Pricing
  • Contact
  • Suggest a method

Entries are compiled from published sources for reference. Verifying the accuracy and suitability of any information for your own use remains your responsibility.

© 2026 ScholarGate · A research-method reference library
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • Terms
  • Delete account