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Neuroevolutionary Feature Representations for Causal Inference

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

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Abstract

Within the field of causal inference, we consider the problem of estimating heterogeneous treatment effects from data. We propose and validate a novel approach for learning feature representations to aid the estimation of the conditional average treatment effect or CATE. Our method focuses on an intermediate layer in a neural network trained to predict the outcome from the features. In contrast to previous approaches that encourage the distribution of representations to be treatment-invariant, we leverage a genetic algorithm that optimizes over representations useful for predicting the outcome to select those less useful for predicting the treatment. This allows us to retain information within the features useful for predicting outcome even if that information may be related to treatment assignment. We validate our method on synthetic examples and illustrate its use on a real life dataset.

Description

Keywords

Causal inference, Heterogeneous treatment effects, Feature representations, Neuroevolutionary algorithms, Counterfactual inference

Journal Title

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Conference Name

International Conference on Computational Science

Journal ISSN

0302-9743
1611-3349

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer International Publishing
Sponsorship
Adobe Inc. (San José, Calif., USA)