用变分因果推断生成反事实结果,无需真实反事实样本。
Counterfactual Generative Modeling with Variational Causal Inference
- 提出新框架,基于变分贝叶斯实现反事实生成的端到端监督。
- 在多个基准上优于现有模型,无需依赖反事实数据样本。
- 能解耦外生噪声,更准确识别干预的因果效应,适合高维数据建模。
在高维结果(如基因表达、人脸图像)且协变量有限的情况下,传统因果推断与监督学习难以估计个体在干预下的反事实结果。此时,仅靠协变量不足以预测反事实结果,必须利用观测结果中包含的个体信息。先前基于变分推断的反事实生成模型多聚焦于条件变分自编码器的神经网络改进,但我们认为其形式本质上不适用于因果推断中的反事实概念。本文提出一种新型变分贝叶斯因果推断框架及其理论基础,支持在训练中无须反事实样本即可实现反事实监督,并鼓励解耦外生噪声的捕捉,从而帮助正确识别反事实生成中的因果效应。实验表明,该框架在多个基准任务上均优于当前最优模型。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Estimating an individual's counterfactual outcomes under interventions is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, facial images) and covariates are relatively limited. In this case, to predict one's outcomes under counterfactual treatments, it is crucial to leverage individual information contained in the observed outcome in addition to the covariates. Prior works using variational inference in counterfactual generative modeling have been focusing on neural adaptations and model variants within the conditional variational autoencoder formulation, which we argue is fundamentally ill-suited to the notion of counterfactual in causal inference. In this work, we present a novel variational Bayesian causal inference framework and its theoretical backings to properly handle counterfactual generative modeling tasks, through which we are able to conduct counterfactual supervision end-to-end during training without any counterfactual samples, and encourage disentangled exogenous noise abduction that aids the correct identification of causal effect in counterfactual generations. In experiments, we demonstrate the advantage of our framework compared to state-of-the-art models in counterfactual generative modeling on multiple benchmarks.
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