Estimating individual treatment effects from data of randomized experiments is a critical task in causal inference. The Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) is usually made in causal inference. However, interference can introduce bias when the assigned treatment on one unit affects the potential outcomes of the neighboring units. This interference phenomenon is known as spillover effect in economics or peer effect in social science. Usually, in randomized experiments or observational studies with interconnected units, one can only observe treatment responses under interference. Hence, how to estimate the superimposed causal effect and recover the individual treatment effect in the presence of interference becomes a challenging task in causal inference. In this work, we study causal effect estimation under general network interference using GNNs, which are powerful tools for capturing the dependency in the graph. After deriving causal effect estimators, we further study intervention policy improvement on the graph under capacity constraint. We give policy regret bounds under network interference and treatment capacity constraint. Furthermore, a heuristic graph structure-dependent error bound for GNN-based causal estimators is provided.
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；IBM Research Zürich（苏黎世IBM研究院）
Inferring causal structures from experimentation is a central task in many domains. For example, in biology, recent advances allow us to obtain single-cell expression data under multiple interventions such as drugs or gene knockouts. However, the targets of the interventions are often uncertain or unknown and the number of observations limited. As a result, standard causal discovery methods can no longer be reliably used. To fill this gap, we propose a Bayesian framework (BaCaDI) for discovering and reasoning about the causal structure that underlies data generated under various unknown experi…
Doubly Robust Causal Effect Estimation under Networked Interference via Targeted Learning
Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu)（琶洲实验室（黄埔））；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Shantou University（汕头大学）
The most widely discussed methods for estimating the Average Causal Effect/Average Treatment Effect are those for intervention in discrete binary variables whose value represents intervention/non-intervention groups. On the other hand, methods for intervening in continuous variables independent of data generating models have not been developed. In this study, we give a method for estimating the average causal effect for intervention in continuous variables that can be applied to data of any generating models as long as the causal effect is identifiable. The proposing method is independent of m…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61/NICTA（Data61/国家信息与通信技术研究院）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit feedback that is not exploited by existing approaches. We propose a new algorithm that exploits the causal feedback and prove a bound on its simple regret that is strictly better (in all quantities) than algorithms that do not use the additional causal information.
Deciphering interventional dynamical causality from non-intervention complex systems
Research Institute of Intelligent Complex Systems & CISOR, Fudan University（智能复杂系统研究所及CISOR，复旦大学）；International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, The University of Tokyo（神经智能国际研究中心，东京大学先进研究所，东京大学）；School of Pharmacy, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine（上海中医药大学药学院）；Institute of AI and Robotics, College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University（人工智能与机器人研究所，智能机器人与先进制造学院，复旦大学）；Frontiers Science Center for Deep Ocean Multispheres and Earth System, Key Laboratory of Marine Chemistry Theory and Technology, Ministry of Education, Ocean University of China（深海多球体与地球系统前沿科学中心，海洋化学理论与技术重点实验室，教育部，中国海洋大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences and School of AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（数学科学学院和人工智能学院，上海交通大学）；Key Laboratory of Systems Health Science of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences（浙江省系统健康科学重点实验室，杭州高级研究所，中国科学院大学，中国科学院）
Relaxing Faithfulness with Intervention-Only Causal Discovery
Thayer School of Engineering Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院塞耶工程学院）；Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard（麻省理工学院和哈佛大学布罗德研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
In this paper, we discuss structure learning of causal networks from multiple data sets obtained by external intervention experiments where we do not know what variables are manipulated. For example, the conditions in these experiments are changed by changing temperature or using drugs, but we do not know what target variables are manipulated by the external interventions. From such data sets, the structure learning becomes more difficult. For this case, we first discuss the identifiability of causal structures. Next we present a graph-merging method for learning causal networks for the case t…
Interventions are central to causal learning and reasoning. Yet ultimately an intervention is an abstraction: an agent embedded in a physical environment (perhaps modeled as a Markov decision process) does not typically come equipped with the notion of an intervention -- its action space is typically ego-centric, without actions of the form `intervene on X'. Such a correspondence between ego-centric actions and interventions would be challenging to hard-code. It would instead be better if an agent learnt which sequence of actions allow it to make targeted manipulations of the environment, and …
LUMLIS (Lisbon ELLIS Unit)（里斯本ELLIS单元LUMLIS）；Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；Unbabel（Unbabel公司）
Recent work has shown promising results in causal discovery by leveraging interventional data with gradient-based methods, even when the intervened variables are unknown. However, previous work assumes that the correspondence between samples and interventions is known, which is often unrealistic. We envision a scenario with an extensive dataset sampled from multiple intervention distributions and one observation distribution, but where we do not know which distribution originated each sample and how the intervention affected the system, \textit{i.e.}, interventions are entirely latent. We prop…
Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single latent confounder that takes values in the same space as the treatment variable, without changing the observational and interventional distributions the causal model entails. This allows us to estimate the causal effect in a principled way from combined data without relying on the common but often unrealistic assumption that all confounders have been observ…
Trust Your $\nabla$: Gradient-based Intervention Targeting for Causal Discovery
Warsaw University（华沙大学）；IDEAS NCBR；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Helmholtz, TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学亥姆霍兹中心）；Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院数学研究所）
The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some important areas, multiple interventions are concurrently applied. Disentangling the effects of single interventions from jointly applied interventions is a challenging task -- especially as simultaneously applied interventions can interact. This problem is made harder still by unobserved confounders, which influence both treatments and outcome. We address this c…
Describing the causal relations governing a system is a fundamental task in many scientific fields, ideally addressed by experimental studies. However, obtaining data under intervention scenarios may not always be feasible, while discovering causal relations from purely observational data is notoriously challenging. In certain settings, such as genomics, we may have data from heterogeneous study conditions, with soft (partial) interventions only pertaining to a subset of the study variables, whose effects and targets are possibly unknown. Combining data from experimental and observational stud…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）；Microsoft Research Cambridge（微软剑桥研究院）
This paper studies the problem of performing a sequence of optimal interventions in a causal dynamical system where both the target variable of interest and the inputs evolve over time. This problem arises in a variety of domains e.g. system biology and operational research. Dynamic Causal Bayesian Optimization (DCBO) brings together ideas from sequential decision making, causal inference and Gaussian process (GP) emulation. DCBO is useful in scenarios where all causal effects in a graph are changing over time. At every time step DCBO identifies a local optimal intervention by integrating both…
We consider recovering a causal graph in presence of latent variables, where we seek to minimize the cost of interventions used in the recovery process. We consider two intervention cost models: (1) a linear cost model where the cost of an intervention on a subset of variables has a linear form, and (2) an identity cost model where the cost of an intervention is the same, regardless of what variables it is on, i.e., the goal is just to minimize the number of interventions. Under the linear cost model, we give an algorithm to identify the ancestral relations of the underlying causal graph, achi…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Mila（米拉人工智能研究所）；Universite de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；GlaxoSmithKline（葛兰素史克）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；KTH Stockholm（瑞典皇家理工学院）；DeepMind（深度思维）
Discovering causal structures from data is a challenging inference problem of fundamental importance in all areas of science. The appealing properties of neural networks have recently led to a surge of interest in differentiable neural network-based methods for learning causal structures from data. So far, differentiable causal discovery has focused on static datasets of observational or fixed interventional origin. In this work, we introduce an active intervention targeting (AIT) method which enables a quick identification of the underlying causal structure of the data-generating process. Our…
We explore how observational and interventional causal discovery methods can be combined. A state-of-the-art observational causal discovery algorithm for time series capable of handling latent confounders and contemporaneous effects, called LPCMCI, is extended to profit from casual constraints found through randomized control trials. Numerical results show that, given perfect interventional constraints, the reconstructed structural causal models (SCMs) of the extended LPCMCI allow 84.6% of the time for the optimal prediction of the target variable. The implementation of interventional and obse…
Scalable Contrastive Causal Discovery under Unknown Soft Interventions
Department of Systems Biology, Columbia University Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics, Columbia University（系统生物学系，哥伦比亚大学伊万尼癌症动力学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）；Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics, Columbia University（伊万尼癌症动力学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）；Department of Computer Science, Columbia University（计算机科学系，哥伦比亚大学）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University（生物医学工程系，哥伦比亚大学）；Data Science Institute, Columbia University（数据科学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Causal discovery from observational and interventional data is challenging due to limited data and non-identifiability: factors that introduce uncertainty in estimating the underlying structural causal model (SCM). Selecting experiments (interventions) based on the uncertainty arising from both factors can expedite the identification of the SCM. Existing methods in experimental design for causal discovery from limited data either rely on linear assumptions for the SCM or select only the intervention target. This work incorporates recent advances in Bayesian causal discovery into the Bayesian o…
The most fundamental problem in statistical causality is determining causal relationships from limited data. Probability trees, which combine prior causal structures with Bayesian updates, have been suggested as a possible solution. In this work, we quantify the information gain from a single intervention and show that both the anticipated information gain, prior to making an intervention, and the expected gain from an intervention have simple expressions. This results in an active-learning method that simply selects the intervention with the highest anticipated gain, which we illustrate throu…
Generative Intervention Models for Causal Perturbation Modeling
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机科学系）；Munich Center for Machine Learning, Germany（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
Causal inference methods are widely applied in various decision-making domains such as precision medicine, optimal policy and economics. Central to these applications is the treatment effect estimation of intervention strategies. Current estimation methods are mostly restricted to the deterministic treatment, which however, is unable to address the stochastic space treatment policies. Moreover, previous methods can only make binary yes-or-no decisions based on the treatment effect, lacking the capability of providing fine-grained effect estimation degree to explain the process of decision maki…
Background and Aims: The methods with which prediction models are usually developed mean that neither the parameters nor the predictions should be interpreted causally. However, when prediction models are used to support decision making, there is often a need for predicting outcomes under hypothetical interventions. We aimed to identify published methods for developing and validating prediction models that enable risk estimation of outcomes under hypothetical interventions, utilizing causal inference: their main methodological approaches, underlying assumptions, targeted estimands, and potenti…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；GlaxoSmithKline（葛兰素史克）；TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Helmholtz AI（亥姆霍兹人工智能研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
It is known that from purely observational data, a causal DAG is identifiable only up to its Markov equivalence class, and for many ground truth DAGs, the direction of a large portion of the edges will be remained unidentified. The golden standard for learning the causal DAG beyond Markov equivalence is to perform a sequence of interventions in the system and use the data gathered from the interventional distributions. We consider a setup in which given a budget $k$, we design $k$ interventions non-adaptively. We cast the problem of finding the best intervention target set as an optimization p…
For exposures $X$ like obesity, no precise and unambiguous definition exists for the hypothetical intervention $do(X = x_0)$. This has raised concerns about the relevance of causal effects estimated from observational studies for such exposures. Under the framework of structural causal models, we study how the effect of $do(X = x_0)$ relates to the effect of interventions on causes of $X$. We show that for interventions focusing on causes of $X$ that affect the outcome through $X$ only, the effect of $do(X = x_0)$ equals the effect of the considered intervention. On the other hand, for interve…
In this paper, we deal with the problem of estimating the intervention effect in the statistical causal analysis using the structural equation model and the causal diagram. The intervention effect is defined as a causal effect on the response variable $Y$ when the causal variable $X$ is fixed to a certain value by an external operation and is defined based on the causal diagram. The intervention effect is defined as a function of the probability distributions in the causal diagram, however, generally these probability distributions are unknown, so it is required to estimate them from data. In …
Can Large Language Models Help Experimental Design for Causal Discovery?
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We consider the minimum cost intervention design problem: Given the essential graph of a causal graph and a cost to intervene on a variable, identify the set of interventions with minimum total cost that can learn any causal graph with the given essential graph. We first show that this problem is NP-hard. We then prove that we can achieve a constant factor approximation to this problem with a greedy algorithm. We then constrain the sparsity of each intervention. We develop an algorithm that returns an intervention design that is nearly optimal in terms of size for sparse graphs with sparse int…
We consider the problem of estimating causal DAG models from a mix of observational and interventional data, when the intervention targets are partially or completely unknown. This problem is highly relevant for example in genomics, since gene knockout technologies are known to have off-target effects. We characterize the interventional Markov equivalence class of DAGs that can be identified from interventional data with unknown intervention targets. In addition, we propose a provably consistent algorithm for learning the interventional Markov equivalence class from such data. The proposed alg…
From observational data alone, a causal DAG is only identifiable up to Markov equivalence. Interventional data generally improves identifiability; however, the gain of an intervention strongly depends on the intervention target, that is, the intervened variables. We present active learning (that is, optimal experimental design) strategies calculating optimal interventions for two different learning goals. The first one is a greedy approach using single-vertex interventions that maximizes the number of edges that can be oriented after each intervention. The second one yields in polynomial time …
