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Main Authors: Hsu, Chan, Wu, Jun-Ting, Kang, Yihuang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15055
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author Hsu, Chan
Wu, Jun-Ting
Kang, Yihuang
author_facet Hsu, Chan
Wu, Jun-Ting
Kang, Yihuang
contents Understanding and inferencing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (HTE) and Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) are vital for developing personalized treatment recommendations. Many state-of-the-art approaches achieve inspiring performance in estimating HTE on benchmark datasets or simulation studies. However, the indirect predicting manner and complex model architecture reduce the interpretability of these approaches. To mitigate the gap between predictive performance and heterogeneity interpretability, we introduce the Causal Rule Forest (CRF), a novel approach to learning hidden patterns from data and transforming the patterns into interpretable multi-level Boolean rules. By training the other interpretable causal inference models with data representation learned by CRF, we can reduce the predictive errors of these models in estimating HTE and CATE, while keeping their interpretability for identifying subgroups that a treatment is more effective. Our experiments underscore the potential of CRF to advance personalized interventions and policies, paving the way for future research to enhance its scalability and application across complex causal inference challenges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_15055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Rule Forest: Toward Interpretable and Precise Treatment Effect Estimation
Hsu, Chan
Wu, Jun-Ting
Kang, Yihuang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding and inferencing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (HTE) and Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE) are vital for developing personalized treatment recommendations. Many state-of-the-art approaches achieve inspiring performance in estimating HTE on benchmark datasets or simulation studies. However, the indirect predicting manner and complex model architecture reduce the interpretability of these approaches. To mitigate the gap between predictive performance and heterogeneity interpretability, we introduce the Causal Rule Forest (CRF), a novel approach to learning hidden patterns from data and transforming the patterns into interpretable multi-level Boolean rules. By training the other interpretable causal inference models with data representation learned by CRF, we can reduce the predictive errors of these models in estimating HTE and CATE, while keeping their interpretability for identifying subgroups that a treatment is more effective. Our experiments underscore the potential of CRF to advance personalized interventions and policies, paving the way for future research to enhance its scalability and application across complex causal inference challenges.
title Causal Rule Forest: Toward Interpretable and Precise Treatment Effect Estimation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15055