Meta-Learners for Partially-Identified Treatment Effects Across Multiple Environments

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Schweisthal, Jonas, Frauen, Dennis, van der Schaar, Mihaela, Feuerriegel, Stefan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866929373487038464
author Schweisthal, Jonas
Frauen, Dennis
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Feuerriegel, Stefan
author_facet Schweisthal, Jonas
Frauen, Dennis
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Feuerriegel, Stefan
contents Estimating the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) from observational data is relevant for many applications such as personalized medicine. Here, we focus on the widespread setting where the observational data come from multiple environments, such as different hospitals, physicians, or countries. Furthermore, we allow for violations of standard causal assumptions, namely, overlap within the environments and unconfoundedness. To this end, we move away from point identification and focus on partial identification. Specifically, we show that current assumptions from the literature on multiple environments allow us to interpret the environment as an instrumental variable (IV). This allows us to adapt bounds from the IV literature for partial identification of CATE by leveraging treatment assignment mechanisms across environments. Then, we propose different model-agnostic learners (so-called meta-learners) to estimate the bounds that can be used in combination with arbitrary machine learning models. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our meta-learners across various experiments using both simulated and real-world data. Finally, we discuss the applicability of our meta-learners to partial identification in instrumental variable settings, such as randomized controlled trials with non-compliance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_02464
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Meta-Learners for Partially-Identified Treatment Effects Across Multiple Environments
Schweisthal, Jonas
Frauen, Dennis
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Feuerriegel, Stefan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Estimating the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) from observational data is relevant for many applications such as personalized medicine. Here, we focus on the widespread setting where the observational data come from multiple environments, such as different hospitals, physicians, or countries. Furthermore, we allow for violations of standard causal assumptions, namely, overlap within the environments and unconfoundedness. To this end, we move away from point identification and focus on partial identification. Specifically, we show that current assumptions from the literature on multiple environments allow us to interpret the environment as an instrumental variable (IV). This allows us to adapt bounds from the IV literature for partial identification of CATE by leveraging treatment assignment mechanisms across environments. Then, we propose different model-agnostic learners (so-called meta-learners) to estimate the bounds that can be used in combination with arbitrary machine learning models. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our meta-learners across various experiments using both simulated and real-world data. Finally, we discuss the applicability of our meta-learners to partial identification in instrumental variable settings, such as randomized controlled trials with non-compliance.
title Meta-Learners for Partially-Identified Treatment Effects Across Multiple Environments
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02464