Estimating Treatment Effects via Orthogonal RegularizationDownload PDF

28 Sept 2020 (modified: 05 May 2023)ICLR 2021 Conference Blind SubmissionReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Treatment Effects, Regularization, Neural Networks
Abstract: Decision-making often requires accurate estimation of causal effects from observational data. This is challenging as outcomes of alternative decisions are not observed and have to be estimated. Previous methods estimate outcomes based on unconfoundedness but neglect any constraints that unconfoundedness imposes on the outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel regularization framework in which we formalize unconfoundedness as an orthogonality constraint. We provide theoretical guarantees that this yields an asymptotically normal estimator for the average causal effect. Compared to other estimators, its asymptotic variance is strictly smaller. Based on our regularization framework, we develop deep orthogonal networks for unconfounded treatments (DONUT) which learn outcomes that are orthogonal to the treatment assignment. Using a variety of benchmark datasets for causal inference, we demonstrate that DONUT outperforms the state-of-the-art substantially.
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One-sentence Summary: In order to estimate average causal effects, we develop a regularization framework in which we formalize unconfoundedness as an orthogonality constraint.
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