Variational Auto-Encoder Architectures that Excel at Causal Inference

Negar Hassanpour, Russell Greiner

Keywords: Causal Inference, Generative Modelling, Distributional Shift

Abstract: This paper provides a generative approach for causal inference using data from observational studies. Inspired by the work of Kingma et al. (2014), we propose a sequence of three architectures (namely Series, Parallel, and Hybrid) that each incorporate their M1 and M2 models as building blocks. Each architecture is an improvement over the previous one in terms of estimating causal effect, culminating in the Hybrid model. The Hybrid model is designed to encourage decomposing the underlying factors of any observational dataset; this in turn, helps to accurately estimate all treatment outcomes. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of all three proposed architectures compared to both state-of-the-art discriminative as well as other generative approaches in the literature.

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One-sentence Summary: A VAE-based generative approach for causal inference using data from observational studies.

Reviewed Version (pdf): https://openreview.net/references/pdf?id=00B5KMeMNB