论文标题
在没有观察到的混杂因素的情况下,将因果关系与干预措施集合起来。
Disentangling Causal Effects from Sets of Interventions in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders
论文作者
论文摘要
在许多领域中回答因果问题的能力至关重要,因为因果推论允许人们了解干预措施的影响。在许多应用中,在给定时间只能进行一次干预。但是,在某些重要领域,同时采用多种干预措施。将单个干预措施与共同应用干预措施的影响是一项具有挑战性的任务,尤其是因为同时应用干预措施可以相互作用。没有观察到的混杂因素使这个问题更加困难,这两者都会影响治疗和结果。我们通过从观察数据和干预措施集中学习单一干预的效果来应对这一挑战。我们证明这通常是不可能的,但是提供了识别证明,表明它可以在具有添加剂,多元高斯噪声的非线性连续结构因果模型中实现,即使存在未观察到的混杂因素。重要的是,我们展示了如何结合观察到的协变量并学习异质治疗效果。根据可识别性证明,我们提供了一种算法,该算法通过汇总来自不同制度的数据并共同最大化合并可能性来学习因果模型参数。我们方法的有效性在综合数据和现实世界中均得到了经验证明。
The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some important areas, multiple interventions are concurrently applied. Disentangling the effects of single interventions from jointly applied interventions is a challenging task -- especially as simultaneously applied interventions can interact. This problem is made harder still by unobserved confounders, which influence both treatments and outcome. We address this challenge by aiming to learn the effect of a single-intervention from both observational data and sets of interventions. We prove that this is not generally possible, but provide identification proofs demonstrating that it can be achieved under non-linear continuous structural causal models with additive, multivariate Gaussian noise -- even when unobserved confounders are present. Importantly, we show how to incorporate observed covariates and learn heterogeneous treatment effects. Based on the identifiability proofs, we provide an algorithm that learns the causal model parameters by pooling data from different regimes and jointly maximizing the combined likelihood. The effectiveness of our method is empirically demonstrated on both synthetic and real-world data.