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arXiv 2202.10885stat.MLcs.LG
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学习Infomax和领域独立表示用于真实世界数据的因果关系推断

Learning Infomax and Domain-Independent Representations for Causal Effect Inference with Real-World Data

Ant Group(蚂蚁集团);University of Georgia(佐治亚大学)

Zhixuan Chu, Stephen Rathbun, Sheng Li

摘要:

对真实世界数据进行因果推断的最大挑战是处理由治疗选择偏倚引起的不同治疗方案的协变量不平衡。为了解决这个问题,最近的文献已经探索了基于不同域发散度量的域不变表示学习(例如,瓦瑟斯坦距离、最大平均差异、位置相关度量和域重叠)。在本文中,我们揭示了这些策略的弱点,即,它们导致在实施域不变性时丢失预测信息;并且处理效应估计性能是不稳定的,这严重依赖于域分布的特性和域发散度量的选择。受信息论的启发,我们提出学习Infomax和领域独立表示来解决上述难题。我们的方法利用全局特征表示和个体特征表示之间的互信息,以及特征表示和治疗分配预测之间的互信息,以便最大限度地捕获治疗组和对照组的共同预测信息。此外,我们的方法过滤掉工具和无关变量的影响,从而有效地提高了潜在结果的预测能力。在合成数据集和真实数据集上的实验结果表明,我们的方法在因果效应推理上达到了最先进的性能。此外,我们的方法表现出可靠的预测性能时,面对不同的数据分布特征,复杂的变量类型,严重的协变量不平衡的数据。

英文摘要:

The foremost challenge to causal inference with real-world data is to handle the imbalance in the covariates with respect to different treatment options, caused by treatment selection bias. To address this issue, recent literature has explored domain-invariant representation learning based on different domain divergence metrics (e.g., Wasserstein distance, maximum mean discrepancy, position-dependent metric, and domain overlap). In this paper, we reveal the weaknesses of these strategies, i.e., they lead to the loss of predictive information when enforcing the domain invariance; and the treatment effect estimation performance is unstable, which heavily relies on the characteristics of the domain distributions and the choice of domain divergence metrics. Motivated by information theory, we propose to learn the Infomax and Domain-Independent Representations to solve the above puzzles. Our method utilizes the mutual information between the global feature representations and individual feature representations, and the mutual information between feature representations and treatment assignment predictions, in order to maximally capture the common predictive information for both treatment and control groups. Moreover, our method filters out the influence of instrumental and irrelevant variables, and thus it effectively increases the predictive ability of potential outcomes. Experimental results on both the synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on causal effect inference. Moreover, our method exhibits reliable prediction performances when facing data with different characteristics of data distributions, complicated variable types, and severe covariate imbalance.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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