Causal Effect Inference for Structured Treatments

Jean Kaddour, Yuchen Zhu, Qi Liu, Matt Kusner, Ricardo Silva

Keywords: Causal Inference, Causal Effects

TL;DR: This paper addresses causal effect inference when treatments are structured (e.g., graphs, images, text, etc.) by generalizing the Robinson decomposition to isolate the causal estimand.

Abstract: We address the estimation of conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) for structured treatments (e.g., graphs, images, texts). Given a weak condition on the effect, we propose the generalized Robinson decomposition, which (i) isolates the causal estimand (reducing regularization bias), (ii) allows one to plug in arbitrary models for learning, and (iii) possesses a quasi-oracle convergence guarantee under mild assumptions. In experiments with small-world and molecular graphs we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior work in CATE estimation.

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Code: https://github.com/JeanKaddour/SIN

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2106.01939/code)