Causal Knowledge Transfer from Task Affinity

Ahmed Aloui, Juncheng Dong, Cat Phuoc Le, Vahid Tarokh

Keywords: Causal Inference, Transfer Learning

Abstract: Recent developments in deep representation models through counterfactual balancing have led to a promising framework for estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITEs) that are essential to causal inference in the Neyman-Rubin potential outcomes framework. While Randomized Control Trials are vital to understanding causal effects, they are sometimes infeasible, costly, or unethical to conduct. Motivated by these potential obstacles to data acquisition, we focus on transferring the causal knowledge acquired in prior experiments to new scenarios for which only limited data is available. To this end, we first observe that the absolute values of ITEs are invariant under the action of the symmetric group on the labels of treatments. Given this invariance, we propose a symmetrized task distance for calculating the similarity of a target scenario with those encountered before. The aforementioned task distance is then used to transfer causal knowledge from the closest of all the available previously learned tasks to the target scenario. We provide upper bounds on the counterfactual loss and ITE error of the target task indicating the transferability of causal knowledge. Empirical studies are provided for various real-world, semi-synthetic, and synthetic datasets demonstrating that the proposed symmetrized task distance is strongly related to the estimation of the counterfactual loss. Numerical results indicate that transferring causal knowledge reduces the amount of required data by up to 95\% when compared to training from scratch. These results reveal the promise of our method when applied to important albeit challenging real-world scenarios such as transferring the knowledge of treatment effects (e.g., medicine, social policy, personal training, etc.) studied on a population to other groups absent in the study.

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