Automated Exposure Mapping for Networked Interference

Yunxin Mao, Haotian Wang, Yishuai Cai, Minglong Li, Ji Wang, Wenjing Yang

Abstract: By characterizing interactions and influences across individuals, networked interference aims to estimate cross-individual treatment effects. For each individual, one of the central components of existing approaches is to manually design an exposure mapping from their neighboring covariates (including their own ones) to different exposure conditions. However, handcraft neighboring structures defined by such manual schemes struggle to capture the complex and flexible structures exhibited by real-world social networks. To bridge this gap, we propose an Automated Exposure Mapping Network (AEMNet) by capturing networked interference conditions automatically with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and achieving mapping with deep embedded clustering. The learned representations between individuals in the graph structure reveal patterns and structures hidden behind data, facilitating application on large-scale, relationally complex networked data. We conducted extensive experiments demonstrating that our approach outperforms the baselines in both quality and flexibility, underscoring its ability to better characterize the interference relationships.