Structured Learning of Compositional Sequential Interventions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yu, Jialin, Koukorinis, Andreas, Colombo, Nicolò, Zhu, Yuchen, Silva, Ricardo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Yu, Jialin
Koukorinis, Andreas
Colombo, Nicolò
Zhu, Yuchen
Silva, Ricardo
author_facet Yu, Jialin
Koukorinis, Andreas
Colombo, Nicolò
Zhu, Yuchen
Silva, Ricardo
contents We consider sequential treatment regimes where each unit is exposed to combinations of interventions over time. When interventions are described by qualitative labels, such as "close schools for a month due to a pandemic" or "promote this podcast to this user during this week", it is unclear which appropriate structural assumptions allow us to generalize behavioral predictions to previously unseen combinations of interventions. Standard black-box approaches mapping sequences of categorical variables to outputs are applicable, but they rely on poorly understood assumptions on how reliable generalization can be obtained, and may underperform under sparse sequences, temporal variability, and large action spaces. To approach that, we pose an explicit model for composition, that is, how the effect of sequential interventions can be isolated into modules, clarifying which data conditions allow for the identification of their combined effect at different units and time steps. We show the identification properties of our compositional model, inspired by advances in causal matrix factorization methods. Our focus is on predictive models for novel compositions of interventions instead of matrix completion tasks and causal effect estimation. We compare our approach to flexible but generic black-box models to illustrate how structure aids prediction in sparse data conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structured Learning of Compositional Sequential Interventions
Yu, Jialin
Koukorinis, Andreas
Colombo, Nicolò
Zhu, Yuchen
Silva, Ricardo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We consider sequential treatment regimes where each unit is exposed to combinations of interventions over time. When interventions are described by qualitative labels, such as "close schools for a month due to a pandemic" or "promote this podcast to this user during this week", it is unclear which appropriate structural assumptions allow us to generalize behavioral predictions to previously unseen combinations of interventions. Standard black-box approaches mapping sequences of categorical variables to outputs are applicable, but they rely on poorly understood assumptions on how reliable generalization can be obtained, and may underperform under sparse sequences, temporal variability, and large action spaces. To approach that, we pose an explicit model for composition, that is, how the effect of sequential interventions can be isolated into modules, clarifying which data conditions allow for the identification of their combined effect at different units and time steps. We show the identification properties of our compositional model, inspired by advances in causal matrix factorization methods. Our focus is on predictive models for novel compositions of interventions instead of matrix completion tasks and causal effect estimation. We compare our approach to flexible but generic black-box models to illustrate how structure aids prediction in sparse data conditions.
title Structured Learning of Compositional Sequential Interventions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05745