Estimating Direct and Indirect Causal Effects of Spatiotemporal Interventions in Presence of Spatial Interference

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Autori principali: Ali, Sahara, Faruque, Omar, Wang, Jianwu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ali, Sahara
Faruque, Omar
Wang, Jianwu
author_facet Ali, Sahara
Faruque, Omar
Wang, Jianwu
contents Spatial interference (SI) occurs when the treatment at one location affects the outcomes at other locations. Accounting for spatial interference in spatiotemporal settings poses further challenges as interference violates the stable unit treatment value assumption, making it infeasible for standard causal inference methods to quantify the effects of time-varying treatment at spatially varying outcomes. In this paper, we first formalize the concept of spatial interference in case of time-varying treatment assignments by extending the potential outcome framework under the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. We then propose our deep learning based potential outcome model for spatiotemporal causal inference. We utilize latent factor modeling to reduce the bias due to time-varying confounding while leveraging the power of U-Net architecture to capture global and local spatial interference in data over time. Our causal estimators are an extension of average treatment effect (ATE) for estimating direct (DATE) and indirect effects (IATE) of spatial interference on treated and untreated data. Being the first of its kind deep learning based spatiotemporal causal inference technique, our approach shows advantages over several baseline methods based on the experiment results on two synthetic datasets, with and without spatial interference. Our results on real-world climate dataset also align with domain knowledge, further demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Direct and Indirect Causal Effects of Spatiotemporal Interventions in Presence of Spatial Interference
Ali, Sahara
Faruque, Omar
Wang, Jianwu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Spatial interference (SI) occurs when the treatment at one location affects the outcomes at other locations. Accounting for spatial interference in spatiotemporal settings poses further challenges as interference violates the stable unit treatment value assumption, making it infeasible for standard causal inference methods to quantify the effects of time-varying treatment at spatially varying outcomes. In this paper, we first formalize the concept of spatial interference in case of time-varying treatment assignments by extending the potential outcome framework under the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. We then propose our deep learning based potential outcome model for spatiotemporal causal inference. We utilize latent factor modeling to reduce the bias due to time-varying confounding while leveraging the power of U-Net architecture to capture global and local spatial interference in data over time. Our causal estimators are an extension of average treatment effect (ATE) for estimating direct (DATE) and indirect effects (IATE) of spatial interference on treated and untreated data. Being the first of its kind deep learning based spatiotemporal causal inference technique, our approach shows advantages over several baseline methods based on the experiment results on two synthetic datasets, with and without spatial interference. Our results on real-world climate dataset also align with domain knowledge, further demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.
title Estimating Direct and Indirect Causal Effects of Spatiotemporal Interventions in Presence of Spatial Interference
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08174