Title
Causal Effect Inference with Deep Latent-Variable Models.
Abstract
Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal effects from observational data is the handling of confounders, factors that affect both an intervention and its outcome. A carefully designed observational study attempts to measure all important confounders. However, even if one does not have direct access to all confounders, there may exist noisy and uncertain measurement of proxies for confounders. We build on recent advances in latent variable modeling to simultaneously estimate the unknown latent space summarizing the confounders and the causal effect. Our method is based on Variational Autoencoders (VAE) which follow the causal structure of inference with proxies. We show our method is significantly more robust than existing methods, and matches the state-of-the-art on previous benchmarks focused on individual treatment effects.
Year
Venue
DocType
2017
ADVANCES IN NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS 30 (NIPS 2017)
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
30
1049-5258
14
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.66
15
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christos Louizos11587.95
Uri Shalit243319.91
Joris M. Mooij367950.48
David Sontag4178488.59
Richard S. Zemel54958425.68
Max Welling64875550.34