beta$-Intact-VAE: Identifying and Estimating Causal Effects under Limited Overlap

As an important problem in causal inference, we discuss the identification and estimation of treatment effects (TEs) under limited overlap; that is, when subjects with certain features belong to a single treatment group. We use a latent variable to model a prognostic score which is widely used in bi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors Wu, Pengzhou, Fukumizu, Kenji
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 11.10.2021
Subjects
Computer Science - Learning
Statistics - Machine Learning
Statistics - Methodology
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DOI10.48550/arxiv.2110.05225

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Summary:As an important problem in causal inference, we discuss the identification and estimation of treatment effects (TEs) under limited overlap; that is, when subjects with certain features belong to a single treatment group. We use a latent variable to model a prognostic score which is widely used in biostatistics and sufficient for TEs; i.e., we build a generative prognostic model. We prove that the latent variable recovers a prognostic score, and the model identifies individualized treatment effects. The model is then learned as \beta-Intact-VAE--a new type of variational autoencoder (VAE). We derive the TE error bounds that enable representations balanced for treatment groups conditioned on individualized features. The proposed method is compared with recent methods using (semi-)synthetic datasets.
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2110.05225