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:

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

Source-checkout example with the shipped demo config:

geolift 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.
  • donor_map_*.png: Visualizations mapping the geographical distribution and quality of the donors (if shapefiles are configured).

Example Plots

The source-checkout demo workflow also includes donor-map outputs for each treated unit. The gallery below uses the shipped example maps directly:

Donor map for treatment unit 501
Treatment unit 501
Donor map for treatment unit 502
Treatment unit 502
Donor map for treatment unit 503
Treatment unit 503