How to Evaluate Donor Quality

Selecting the right control (donor) pool is critical for Synthetic Control methods. This guide shows how to evaluate potential donors.

Running Donor Evaluation via CLI

Packaged-install example:

geosc donors --config /path/to/donor_eval_config.yaml --jobs -1

Source-checkout example with the shipped demo config:

geosc donors --config data-config/donor_eval_config.yaml --jobs -1

Built wheel and sdist installs do not include data-config/, so packaged users should provide their own YAML path.

Expected Outputs

  • donor_eval_results.csv: Ranks potential donor regions based on correlation, RMSE, MAPE, and DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) against the treatment unit(s) during the pre-treatment period. Includes quality band, warning flags, per-treatment rank, and normalized recommendation weight.
  • donor_pool_quality.json: Summarizes recommended donor-pool quality and concentration.
  • donor_map_*.png: Visualizations mapping the geographical distribution and quality of the donors (if shapefiles are configured).

selected_weight is a design-stage recommendation weight, not the final SparseSC donor weight used during treatment-effect estimation.

For geography setup, including UK postcode area and postcode district examples, see How to Use Shapemaps.