Optimal Transport for Treatment Effect Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Hao, Chen, Zhichao, Fan, Jiajun, Li, Haoxuan, Liu, Tianqiao, Liu, Weiming, Dai, Quanyu, Wang, Yichao, Dong, Zhenhua, Tang, Ruiming
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Wang, Hao
Chen, Zhichao
Fan, Jiajun
Li, Haoxuan
Liu, Tianqiao
Liu, Weiming
Dai, Quanyu
Wang, Yichao
Dong, Zhenhua
Tang, Ruiming
author_facet Wang, Hao
Chen, Zhichao
Fan, Jiajun
Li, Haoxuan
Liu, Tianqiao
Liu, Weiming
Dai, Quanyu
Wang, Yichao
Dong, Zhenhua
Tang, Ruiming
contents Estimating conditional average treatment effect from observational data is highly challenging due to the existence of treatment selection bias. Prevalent methods mitigate this issue by aligning distributions of different treatment groups in the latent space. However, there are two critical problems that these methods fail to address: (1) mini-batch sampling effects (MSE), which causes misalignment in non-ideal mini-batches with outcome imbalance and outliers; (2) unobserved confounder effects (UCE), which results in inaccurate discrepancy calculation due to the neglect of unobserved confounders. To tackle these problems, we propose a principled approach named Entire Space CounterFactual Regression (ESCFR), which is a new take on optimal transport in the context of causality. Specifically, based on the framework of stochastic optimal transport, we propose a relaxed mass-preserving regularizer to address the MSE issue and design a proximal factual outcome regularizer to handle the UCE issue. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ESCFR can successfully tackle the treatment selection bias and achieve significantly better performance than state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_18286
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Transport for Treatment Effect Estimation
Wang, Hao
Chen, Zhichao
Fan, Jiajun
Li, Haoxuan
Liu, Tianqiao
Liu, Weiming
Dai, Quanyu
Wang, Yichao
Dong, Zhenhua
Tang, Ruiming
Machine Learning
Applications
Estimating conditional average treatment effect from observational data is highly challenging due to the existence of treatment selection bias. Prevalent methods mitigate this issue by aligning distributions of different treatment groups in the latent space. However, there are two critical problems that these methods fail to address: (1) mini-batch sampling effects (MSE), which causes misalignment in non-ideal mini-batches with outcome imbalance and outliers; (2) unobserved confounder effects (UCE), which results in inaccurate discrepancy calculation due to the neglect of unobserved confounders. To tackle these problems, we propose a principled approach named Entire Space CounterFactual Regression (ESCFR), which is a new take on optimal transport in the context of causality. Specifically, based on the framework of stochastic optimal transport, we propose a relaxed mass-preserving regularizer to address the MSE issue and design a proximal factual outcome regularizer to handle the UCE issue. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ESCFR can successfully tackle the treatment selection bias and achieve significantly better performance than state-of-the-art methods.
title Optimal Transport for Treatment Effect Estimation
topic Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18286