Individualised Dose-Response Estimation using Generative Adversarial Nets

Ioana Bica, James Jordon, Mihaela van der Schaar

Keywords: individualised dose-response estimation, treatment effects, causal inference, generative adversarial networks

Abstract: The problem of estimating treatment responses from observational data is by now a well-studied one. Less well studied, though, is the problem of treatment response estimation when the treatments are accompanied by a continuous dosage parameter. In this paper, we tackle this lesser studied problem by building on a modification of the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework that has already demonstrated effectiveness in the former problem. Our model, DRGAN, is flexible, capable of handling multiple treatments each accompanied by a dosage parameter. The key idea is to use a significantly modified GAN model to generate entire dose-response curves for each sample in the training data which will then allow us to use standard supervised methods to learn an inference model capable of estimating these curves for a new sample. Our model consists of 3 blocks: (1) a generator, (2) a discriminator, (3) an inference block. In order to address the challenge presented by the introduction of dosages, we propose novel architectures for both our generator and discriminator. We model the generator as a multi-task deep neural network. In order to address the increased complexity of the treatment space (because of the addition of dosages), we develop a hierarchical discriminator consisting of several networks: (a) a treatment discriminator, (b) a dosage discriminator for each treatment. In the experiments section, we introduce a new semi-synthetic data simulation for use in the dose-response setting and demonstrate improvements over the existing benchmark models.