Structure Maintained Representation Learning Neural Network for Causal Inference

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Sun, Yang, Lu, Wenbin, Zhou, Yi-Hui
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866913973285158912
author Sun, Yang
Lu, Wenbin
Zhou, Yi-Hui
author_facet Sun, Yang
Lu, Wenbin
Zhou, Yi-Hui
contents Recent developments in causal inference have greatly shifted the interest from estimating the average treatment effect to the individual treatment effect. In this article, we improve the predictive accuracy of representation learning and adversarial networks in estimating individual treatment effects by introducing a structure keeper which maintains the correlation between the baseline covariates and their corresponding representations in the high dimensional space. We train a discriminator at the end of representation layers to trade off representation balance and information loss. We show that the proposed discriminator minimizes an upper bound of the treatment estimation error. We can address the tradeoff between distribution balance and information loss by considering the correlations between the learned representation space and the original covariate feature space. We conduct extensive experiments with simulated and real-world observational data to show that our proposed Structure Maintained Representation Learning (SMRL) algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate the algorithms on real electronic health record data from the MIMIC-III database.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure Maintained Representation Learning Neural Network for Causal Inference
Sun, Yang
Lu, Wenbin
Zhou, Yi-Hui
Machine Learning
Methodology
Recent developments in causal inference have greatly shifted the interest from estimating the average treatment effect to the individual treatment effect. In this article, we improve the predictive accuracy of representation learning and adversarial networks in estimating individual treatment effects by introducing a structure keeper which maintains the correlation between the baseline covariates and their corresponding representations in the high dimensional space. We train a discriminator at the end of representation layers to trade off representation balance and information loss. We show that the proposed discriminator minimizes an upper bound of the treatment estimation error. We can address the tradeoff between distribution balance and information loss by considering the correlations between the learned representation space and the original covariate feature space. We conduct extensive experiments with simulated and real-world observational data to show that our proposed Structure Maintained Representation Learning (SMRL) algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate the algorithms on real electronic health record data from the MIMIC-III database.
title Structure Maintained Representation Learning Neural Network for Causal Inference
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01865