Conformal Prediction for Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Schröder, Maresa, Frauen, Dennis, Schweisthal, Jonas, Heß, Konstantin, Melnychuk, Valentyn, Feuerriegel, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Schröder, Maresa
Frauen, Dennis
Schweisthal, Jonas
Heß, Konstantin
Melnychuk, Valentyn
Feuerriegel, Stefan
author_facet Schröder, Maresa
Frauen, Dennis
Schweisthal, Jonas
Heß, Konstantin
Melnychuk, Valentyn
Feuerriegel, Stefan
contents Uncertainty quantification of causal effects is crucial for safety-critical applications such as personalized medicine. A powerful approach for this is conformal prediction, which has several practical benefits due to model-agnostic finite-sample guarantees. Yet, existing methods for conformal prediction of causal effects are limited to binary/discrete treatments and make highly restrictive assumptions such as known propensity scores. In this work, we provide a novel conformal prediction method for potential outcomes of continuous treatments. We account for the additional uncertainty introduced through propensity estimation so that our conformal prediction intervals are valid even if the propensity score is unknown. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We derive finite-sample prediction intervals for potential outcomes of continuous treatments. (2) We provide an algorithm for calculating the derived intervals. (3) We demonstrate the effectiveness of the conformal prediction intervals in experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose conformal prediction for continuous treatments when the propensity score is unknown and must be estimated from data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03094
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conformal Prediction for Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments
Schröder, Maresa
Frauen, Dennis
Schweisthal, Jonas
Heß, Konstantin
Melnychuk, Valentyn
Feuerriegel, Stefan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Uncertainty quantification of causal effects is crucial for safety-critical applications such as personalized medicine. A powerful approach for this is conformal prediction, which has several practical benefits due to model-agnostic finite-sample guarantees. Yet, existing methods for conformal prediction of causal effects are limited to binary/discrete treatments and make highly restrictive assumptions such as known propensity scores. In this work, we provide a novel conformal prediction method for potential outcomes of continuous treatments. We account for the additional uncertainty introduced through propensity estimation so that our conformal prediction intervals are valid even if the propensity score is unknown. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We derive finite-sample prediction intervals for potential outcomes of continuous treatments. (2) We provide an algorithm for calculating the derived intervals. (3) We demonstrate the effectiveness of the conformal prediction intervals in experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose conformal prediction for continuous treatments when the propensity score is unknown and must be estimated from data.
title Conformal Prediction for Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03094