Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects via Sufficient Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Shi, Pengfei, Zhong, Wei, Zhang, Xinyu, Wang, Ningtao, Fu, Xing, Wang, Weiqiang, Jin, Yin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Shi, Pengfei
Zhong, Wei
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Ningtao
Fu, Xing
Wang, Weiqiang
Jin, Yin
author_facet Shi, Pengfei
Zhong, Wei
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Ningtao
Fu, Xing
Wang, Weiqiang
Jin, Yin
contents Estimating the conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is very important in causal inference and has a wide range of applications across many fields. In the estimation process of CATE, the unconfoundedness assumption is typically required to ensure the identifiability of the regression problems. When estimating CATE using high-dimensional data, there have been many variable selection methods and neural network approaches based on representation learning, while these methods do not provide a way to verify whether the subset of variables after dimensionality reduction or the learned representations still satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption during the estimation process, which can lead to ineffective estimates of the treatment effects. Additionally, these methods typically use data from only the treatment or control group when estimating the regression functions for each group. This paper proposes a novel neural network approach named \textbf{CrossNet} to learn a sufficient representation for the features, based on which we then estimate the CATE, where cross indicates that in estimating the regression functions, we used data from their own group as well as cross-utilized data from another group. Numerical simulations and empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the competitive approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_17053
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects via Sufficient Representation Learning
Shi, Pengfei
Zhong, Wei
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Ningtao
Fu, Xing
Wang, Weiqiang
Jin, Yin
Machine Learning
Estimating the conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is very important in causal inference and has a wide range of applications across many fields. In the estimation process of CATE, the unconfoundedness assumption is typically required to ensure the identifiability of the regression problems. When estimating CATE using high-dimensional data, there have been many variable selection methods and neural network approaches based on representation learning, while these methods do not provide a way to verify whether the subset of variables after dimensionality reduction or the learned representations still satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption during the estimation process, which can lead to ineffective estimates of the treatment effects. Additionally, these methods typically use data from only the treatment or control group when estimating the regression functions for each group. This paper proposes a novel neural network approach named \textbf{CrossNet} to learn a sufficient representation for the features, based on which we then estimate the CATE, where cross indicates that in estimating the regression functions, we used data from their own group as well as cross-utilized data from another group. Numerical simulations and empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the competitive approaches.
title Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects via Sufficient Representation Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.17053