Adversarial balancing-based representation learning for causal effect inference with observational data
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Abstract: Learning causal effects from observational data greatly benefits a variety of domains such as health care, education and sociology. For instance, one could estimate the impact of a new drug on specific individuals to assist the clinic plan and improve the survival rate. In this paper, we focus on studying the problem of estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) from observational data. The challenges for this problem are two-fold: on the one hand, we have to derive a causal estimator to estimate the causal quantity from observational data, where there exists confounding bias; on the other hand, we have to deal with the identification of CATE when the distribution of covariates in treatment and control groups are imbalanced. To overcome these challenges, we propose a neural network framework called Adversarial Balancing-based representation learning for Causal Effect Inference (ABCEI), based on the recent advances in representation learning. To ensure the identification of CATE, ABCEI uses adversarial learning to balance the distributions of covariates in treatment and control groups in the latent representation space, without any assumption on the form of the treatment selection/assignment function. In addition, during the representation learning and balancing process, highly predictive information from the original covariate space might be lost. ABCEI can tackle this information loss problem by preserving useful information for predicting causal effects under the regularization of a mutual information estimator. The experimental results show that ABCEI is robust against treatment selection bias, and matches/outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Our experiments show promising results on several datasets, representing different health care domains among others.
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