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 counterfactual outcome


Estimating the Effects of Continuous-valued Interventions using Generative Adversarial Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

While much attention has been given to the problem of estimating the effect of discrete interventions from observational data, relatively little work has been done in the setting of continuous-valued interventions, such as treatments associated with a dosage parameter. In this paper, we tackle this problem by building on a modification of the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. Our model, SCIGAN, is flexible and capable of simultaneously estimating counterfactual outcomes for several different continuous interventions. The key idea is to use a significantly modified GAN model to learn to generate counterfactual outcomes, which can then be used to learn an inference model, using standard supervised methods, capable of estimating these counterfactuals for a new sample. To address the challenges presented by shifting to continuous interventions, we propose a novel architecture for our discriminator - we build a hierarchical discriminator that leverages the structure of the continuous intervention setting. Moreover, we provide theoretical results to support our use of the GAN framework and of the hierarchical discriminator. In the experiments section, we introduce a new semi-synthetic data simulation for use in the continuous intervention setting and demonstrate improvements over the existing benchmark models.


Synthetic Counterfactual Labels for Efficient Conformal Counterfactual Inference

Farzaneh, Amirmohammad, Zecchin, Matteo, Simeone, Osvaldo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work addresses the problem of constructing reliable prediction intervals for individual counterfactual outcomes. Existing conformal counterfactual inference (CCI) methods provide marginal coverage guarantees but often produce overly conservative intervals, particularly under treatment imbalance when counterfactual samples are scarce. We introduce synthetic data-powered CCI (SP-CCI), a new framework that augments the calibration set with synthetic counterfactual labels generated by a pre-trained counterfactual model. To ensure validity, SP-CCI incorporates synthetic samples into a conformal calibration procedure based on risk-controlling prediction sets (RCPS) with a debiasing step informed by prediction-powered inference (PPI). We prove that SP-CCI achieves tighter prediction intervals while preserving marginal coverage, with theoretical guarantees under both exact and approximate importance weighting. Empirical results on different datasets confirm that SP-CCI consistently reduces interval width compared to standard CCI across all settings.


Bayesian Inference of Individualized Treatment Effects using Multi-task Gaussian Processes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Predicated on the increasing abundance of electronic health records, we investigate the problem of inferring individualized treatment effects using observational data. Stemming from the potential outcomes model, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework in which factual and counterfactual outcomes are modeled as the outputs of a function in a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space (vvRKHS). We develop a nonparametric Bayesian method for learning the treatment effects using a multi-task Gaussian process (GP) with a linear coregionalization kernel as a prior over the vvRKHS. The Bayesian approach allows us to compute individualized measures of confidence in our estimates via pointwise credible intervals, which are crucial for realizing the full potential of precision medicine. The impact of selection bias is alleviated via a risk-based empirical Bayes method for adapting the multi-task GP prior, which jointly minimizes the empirical error in factual outcomes and the uncertainty in (unobserved) counterfactual outcomes. We conduct experiments on observational datasets for an interventional social program applied to premature infants, and a left ventricular assist device applied to cardiac patients wait-listed for a heart transplant. In both experiments, we show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.


Bayesian Inference of Individualized Treatment Effects using Multi-task Gaussian Processes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Predicated on the increasing abundance of electronic health records, we investigate the problem of inferring individualized treatment effects using observational data. Stemming from the potential outcomes model, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework in which factual and counterfactual outcomes are modeled as the outputs of a function in a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space (vvRKHS). We develop a nonparametric Bayesian method for learning the treatment effects using a multi-task Gaussian process (GP) with a linear coregion-alization kernel as a prior over the vvRKHS. The Bayesian approach allows us to compute individualized measures of confidence in our estimates via pointwise credible intervals, which are crucial for realizing the full potential of precision medicine. The impact of selection bias is alleviated via a risk-based empirical Bayes method for adapting the multi-task GP prior, which jointly minimizes the empirical error in factual outcomes and the uncertainty in (unobserved) counterfactual outcomes. We conduct experiments on observational datasets for an inter-ventional social program applied to premature infants, and a left ventricular assist device applied to cardiac patients wait-listed for a heart transplant. In both experiments, we show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.


Synergizing Deconfounding and Temporal Generalization For Time-series Counterfactual Outcome Estimation

Liu, Yiling, Dong, Juncheng, Fu, Chen, Shi, Wei, Jiang, Ziyang, Hua, Zhigang, Carlson, David

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Estimating counterfactual outcomes from time-series observations is crucial for effective decision-making, e.g. when to administer a life-saving treatment, yet remains significantly challenging because (i) the counterfactual trajectory is never observed and (ii) confounders evolve with time and distort estimation at every step. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that synergistically integrates two complementary approaches: Sub-treatment Group Alignment (SGA) and Random Temporal Masking (RTM). Instead of the coarse practice of aligning marginal distributions of the treatments in latent space, SGA uses iterative treatment-agnostic clustering to identify fine-grained sub-treatment groups. Aligning these fine-grained groups achieves improved distributional matching, thus leading to more effective deconfounding. We theoretically demonstrate that SGA optimizes a tighter upper bound on counterfactual risk and empirically verify its deconfounding efficacy. RTM promotes temporal generalization by randomly replacing input covariates with Gaussian noises during training. This encourages the model to rely less on potentially noisy or spuriously correlated covariates at the current step and more on stable historical patterns, thereby improving its ability to generalize across time and better preserve underlying causal relationships. Our experiments demonstrate that while applying SGA and RTM individually improves counterfactual outcome estimation, their synergistic combination consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. This success comes from their distinct yet complementary roles: RTM enhances temporal generalization and robustness across time steps, while SGA improves deconfounding at each specific time point.


Representation Learning for Treatment Effect Estimation from Observational Data

Liuyi Yao, Sheng Li, Yaliang Li, Mengdi Huai, Jing Gao, Aidong Zhang

Neural Information Processing Systems

Estimating individual treatment effect (ITE) is a challenging problem in causal inference, due to the missing counterfactuals and the selection bias. Existing ITE estimation methods mainly focus on balancing the distributions of control and treated groups, but ignore the local similarity information that provides meaningful constraints on the ITE estimation. In this paper, we propose a local similarity preserved i ndividual t reatment effect (SITE) estimation method based on deep representation learning. SITE preserves local similarity and balances data distributions simultaneously, by focusing on several hard samples in each mini-batch. Experimental results on synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed SITE method, compared with the state-of-the-art ITE estimation methods.




Representation Learning for Treatment Effect Estimation from Observational Data

Liuyi Yao, Sheng Li, Yaliang Li, Mengdi Huai, Jing Gao, Aidong Zhang

Neural Information Processing Systems

Estimating individual treatment effect (ITE) is a challenging problem in causal inference, due to the missing counterfactuals and the selection bias. Existing ITE estimation methods mainly focus on balancing the distributions of control and treated groups, but ignore the local similarity information that provides meaningful constraints on the ITE estimation. In this paper, we propose a local similarity preserved i ndividual t reatment effect (SITE) estimation method based on deep representation learning. SITE preserves local similarity and balances data distributions simultaneously, by focusing on several hard samples in each mini-batch. Experimental results on synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed SITE method, compared with the state-of-the-art ITE estimation methods.