Heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimation from observational data poses significant challenges due to treatment selection bias. Existing methods address this bias by minimizing distribution discrepancies between treatment groups in latent space, focusing on global alignment. However, the fruitful aspect of local proximity, where similar units exhibit similar outcomes, is often overlooked. In this study, we propose Proximity-aware Counterfactual Regression (PCR) to exploit proximity for representation balancing within the HTE estimation context. Specifically, we introduce a local proximity preservation regularizer based on optimal transport to depict the local proximity in discrepancy calculation. Furthermore, to overcome the curse of dimensionality that renders the estimation of discrepancy ineffective--exacerbated by limited data availability for HTE estimation--we develop an informative subspace projector, which trades off minimal distance precision for improved sample complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PCR accurately matches units across different treatment groups, effectively mitigates treatment selection bias, and significantly outperforms competitors. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/status/ncr-B697.

Time series modeling aims to encode historical sequence to predict future data, which is crucial in diverse applications: long-term forecast in weather prediction [3, 40], short-term prediction in industrial maintenance [24, 7, 35], and missing data imputation in healthcare [30]. A key challenge in time series modeling, distinguishing it from canonical regression tasks, is the presence of autocorrelation. It refers to the dependence between time steps, which exists in both the input and label sequences. To accommodate autocorrelation in input sequences, diverse forecast models have been developed [28, 5, 8], exemplified by recurrent [29], convolution [37] and graph neural networks [25, 4, 11]. Recently, Transformer-based models, utilizing self-attention mechanisms to dynamically assess autocorrelation, have gained prominence in this line of work [20, 26, 13, 38]. Concurrently, there is a growing trend of incorporating frequency analysis into forecast models [41, 21].