Before revision:  The proposed method does not rely on pretreatment covariates and encoder-decoder networks are capable of learning nonconvex combinations of control unit outcomes to construct a counterfactual. To demonstrate the proposed method , I extend a field experiment studying the effect of radio advertisements on electoral competition to observational time-series .
After revision:  The proposed method does not rely on pretreatment covariates and encoder-decoder networks are capable of learning nonconvex combinations of control units, and can handle multiple treated units. Encoder-decoder networks outperform the synthetic control method in simulated and empirical data applications .