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Towards Principled Causal Effect Estimation by Deep Identifiable Models

Pengzhou Wu, Kenji Fukumizu

arXiv 30 Sep 2021 · Statistics — Machine Learning · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2109.15062 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

As an important problem in causal inference, we discuss the estimation of treatment effects (TEs). Representing the confounder as a latent variable, we propose Intact-VAE, a new variant of variational autoencoder (VAE), motivated by the prognostic score that is sufficient for identifying TEs. Our VAE also naturally gives representations balanced for treatment groups, using its prior. Experiments on (semi-)synthetic datasets show state-of-the-art performance under diverse settings, including unobserved confounding. Based on the identifiability of our model, we prove identification of TEs under unconfoundedness, and also discuss (possible) extensions to harder settings.

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81
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Christos Louizos, Uri Shalit, Joris M Mooij, David Sontag, Richard Z… (2017) Causal effect inference with deep latent-variable models1.00063100%
2Uri Shalit, Fredrik D Johansson, and David Sontag (2017) Estimating individual treatment effect: generalization bounds and algorithms0.9568488%
3Anonymous (2021) $$beta-intact-vae: Identifying and estimating causal effects under limited overlap0.9416383%
4Victor Veitch, Yixin Wang, and David Blei (2019) Using embeddings to correct for unobserved confounding in networks0.87472100%
5Ben B Hansen (2008) The prognostic analogue of the propensity score0.8746367%
6Weijia Zhang, Lin Liu, and Jiuyong Li (2020) Treatment effect estimation with disentangled latent factors0.81142100%
7Ilyes Khemakhem, Diederik Kingma, Ricardo Monti, and Aapo Hyvarinen (2020) Variational autoencoders and nonlinear ica: A unifying framework0.73710540%
8Paul R Rosenbaum and Donald B Rubin (1983) The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects0.7373367%
9Fredrik Johansson, Uri Shalit, and David Sontag (2016) Learning representations for counterfactual inference0.73732100%
10Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen, Andrew Ying, Yifan Cui, Xu Shi, and Wang M… (2020) An introduction to proximal causal learning0.73732100%

Showing the top 10 of 81 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1$$-Intact-VAE: Identifying and Estimating Causal Effects under Limited Overlap0.64422