Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models

Vahid Balazadeh Meresht, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Rahul G Krishnan

Keywords: partial identification, average treatment effect, generative adversarial networks

TL;DR: We estimate bounds on the average treatment effect using implicit generative models by estimating partial derivatives of the response function in the interval between two points on the response curve.

Abstract: We consider the problem of partial identification, the estimation of bounds on the treatment effects from observational data. Although studied using discrete treatment variables or in specific causal graphs (e.g., instrumental variables), partial identification has been recently explored using tools from deep generative modeling. We propose a new method for partial identification of average treatment effects (ATEs) in general causal graphs using implicit generative models comprising continuous and discrete random variables. Since ATE with continuous treatment is generally non-regular, we leverage the partial derivatives of response functions to define a regular approximation of ATE, a quantity we call uniform average treatment derivative (UATD). We prove that our algorithm converges to tight bounds on ATE in linear structural causal models (SCMs). For nonlinear SCMs, we empirically show that using UATD leads to tighter and more stable bounds than methods that directly optimize the ATE.