Revisiting Counterfactual Regression through the Lens of Gromov-Wasserstein Information Bottleneck

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yang, Hao, Sun, Zexu, Xu, Hongteng, Chen, Xu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Yang, Hao
Sun, Zexu
Xu, Hongteng
Chen, Xu
author_facet Yang, Hao
Sun, Zexu
Xu, Hongteng
Chen, Xu
contents As a promising individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimation method, counterfactual regression (CFR) maps individuals' covariates to a latent space and predicts their counterfactual outcomes. However, the selection bias between control and treatment groups often imbalances the two groups' latent distributions and negatively impacts this method's performance. In this study, we revisit counterfactual regression through the lens of information bottleneck and propose a novel learning paradigm called Gromov-Wasserstein information bottleneck (GWIB). In this paradigm, we learn CFR by maximizing the mutual information between covariates' latent representations and outcomes while penalizing the kernelized mutual information between the latent representations and the covariates. We demonstrate that the upper bound of the penalty term can be implemented as a new regularizer consisting of $i)$ the fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance between the latent representations of different groups and $ii)$ the gap between the transport cost generated by the model and the cross-group Gromov-Wasserstein distance between the latent representations and the covariates. GWIB effectively learns the CFR model through alternating optimization, suppressing selection bias while avoiding trivial latent distributions. Experiments on ITE estimation tasks show that GWIB consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CFR methods. To promote the research community, we release our project at https://github.com/peteryang1031/Causal-GWIB.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_15505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Counterfactual Regression through the Lens of Gromov-Wasserstein Information Bottleneck
Yang, Hao
Sun, Zexu
Xu, Hongteng
Chen, Xu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
As a promising individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimation method, counterfactual regression (CFR) maps individuals' covariates to a latent space and predicts their counterfactual outcomes. However, the selection bias between control and treatment groups often imbalances the two groups' latent distributions and negatively impacts this method's performance. In this study, we revisit counterfactual regression through the lens of information bottleneck and propose a novel learning paradigm called Gromov-Wasserstein information bottleneck (GWIB). In this paradigm, we learn CFR by maximizing the mutual information between covariates' latent representations and outcomes while penalizing the kernelized mutual information between the latent representations and the covariates. We demonstrate that the upper bound of the penalty term can be implemented as a new regularizer consisting of $i)$ the fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance between the latent representations of different groups and $ii)$ the gap between the transport cost generated by the model and the cross-group Gromov-Wasserstein distance between the latent representations and the covariates. GWIB effectively learns the CFR model through alternating optimization, suppressing selection bias while avoiding trivial latent distributions. Experiments on ITE estimation tasks show that GWIB consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CFR methods. To promote the research community, we release our project at https://github.com/peteryang1031/Causal-GWIB.
title Revisiting Counterfactual Regression through the Lens of Gromov-Wasserstein Information Bottleneck
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15505