-The primary goal in GPCERF is to find appropriate values for the hyper-parameters. In the context of causal inference, ''appropriate'' values of the hyper-parameters are those that make the estimator of CERF as if it is generated from a study with randomized design. To be more concrete, note that the GP estimates $R(w)$ by creating a pseudo-population that is a weighted version of the original dataset [see more details in @Ren_2021_bayesian]. The weight for each sample in the original dataset is a function of the hyperparameters. By tuning the hyperparameters, we can minimize the sample correlations between $W$ and each component of $C$ in this pseudo-population, rendering the pseduo-population to be more balanced on these covariates $C$. In practice, we minimize the covariate balance, which is a summary of the sample correlations between $W$ and each of $C$ to tune our hyper-parameters. Covaraite balance is computed by assessing the correlation between $W$ and $C$ in the pseudo-population using the _wCorr_ R package [@wCorr_R].
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