Orthogonal Representation Learning for Estimating Causal Quantities
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866918468566122496 |
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| author | Melnychuk, Valentyn Frauen, Dennis Schweisthal, Jonas Feuerriegel, Stefan |
| author_facet | Melnychuk, Valentyn Frauen, Dennis Schweisthal, Jonas Feuerriegel, Stefan |
| contents | End-to-end representation learning has become a powerful tool for estimating causal quantities from high-dimensional observational data, but its efficiency remained unclear. Here, we face a central tension: End-to-end representation learning methods often work well in practice but lack asymptotic optimality in the form of the quasi-oracle efficiency. In contrast, two-stage Neyman-orthogonal learners provide such a theoretical optimality property but do not explicitly benefit from the strengths of representation learning. In this work, we step back and ask two research questions: (1) When do representations strengthen existing Neyman-orthogonal learners? and (2) Can a balancing constraint - a commonly proposed technique in the representation learning literature - provide improvements to Neyman-orthogonality? We address these two questions through our theoretical and empirical analysis, where we introduce a unifying framework that connects representation learning with Neyman-orthogonal learners (namely, OR-learners). In particular, we show that, under the low-dimensional manifold hypothesis, the OR-learners can strictly improve the estimation error of the standard Neyman-orthogonal learners. At the same time, we find that the balancing constraint requires an additional inductive bias and cannot generally compensate for the lack of Neyman-orthogonality of the end-to-end approaches. Building on these insights, we offer guidelines for how users can effectively combine representation learning with the classical Neyman-orthogonal learners to achieve both practical performance and theoretical guarantees. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04274 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Orthogonal Representation Learning for Estimating Causal Quantities Melnychuk, Valentyn Frauen, Dennis Schweisthal, Jonas Feuerriegel, Stefan Machine Learning End-to-end representation learning has become a powerful tool for estimating causal quantities from high-dimensional observational data, but its efficiency remained unclear. Here, we face a central tension: End-to-end representation learning methods often work well in practice but lack asymptotic optimality in the form of the quasi-oracle efficiency. In contrast, two-stage Neyman-orthogonal learners provide such a theoretical optimality property but do not explicitly benefit from the strengths of representation learning. In this work, we step back and ask two research questions: (1) When do representations strengthen existing Neyman-orthogonal learners? and (2) Can a balancing constraint - a commonly proposed technique in the representation learning literature - provide improvements to Neyman-orthogonality? We address these two questions through our theoretical and empirical analysis, where we introduce a unifying framework that connects representation learning with Neyman-orthogonal learners (namely, OR-learners). In particular, we show that, under the low-dimensional manifold hypothesis, the OR-learners can strictly improve the estimation error of the standard Neyman-orthogonal learners. At the same time, we find that the balancing constraint requires an additional inductive bias and cannot generally compensate for the lack of Neyman-orthogonality of the end-to-end approaches. Building on these insights, we offer guidelines for how users can effectively combine representation learning with the classical Neyman-orthogonal learners to achieve both practical performance and theoretical guarantees. |
| title | Orthogonal Representation Learning for Estimating Causal Quantities |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04274 |