针对图结构目标的因果效应估计,解决节点偏倚问题。
Treatment Effect Estimation for Graph-Structured Targets
- 基于图结构设计新框架,聚焦混杂变量集缓解偏倚
- 理论分析证明其在减少观测偏倚上优于传统方法
- 适用于社交网络、生物通路等有关系的群体决策
治疗效应估计有助于理解干预与结果之间的因果关系,是多个领域决策的核心任务。尽管多数研究关注个体目标的治疗效应估计,但在特定场景下,需理解一组具有图结构关系的目标上的治疗效应。此时,治疗分配往往依赖于图中某个特定节点(如度最高的节点),导致整体图结构中的小部分产生观测偏倚。然而,由于现有方法依赖全部图信息,难以有效缓解此类偏倚。本文提出图目标治疗效应估计(GraphTEE)框架,专门用于图结构目标的治疗效应估计。该框架通过聚焦混杂变量集并引入新型正则化机制,实现偏倚缓解。我们还提供了理论分析,说明 GraphTEE 在偏倚控制方面表现更优。在合成及半合成数据集上的实验验证了所提方法的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Treatment effect estimation, which helps understand the causality between treatment and outcome variable, is a central task in decision-making across various domains. While most studies focus on treatment effect estimation on individual targets, in specific contexts, there is a necessity to comprehend the treatment effect on a group of targets, especially those that have relationships represented as a graph structure between them. In such cases, the focus of treatment assignment is prone to depend on a particular node of the graph, such as the one with the highest degree, thus resulting in an observational bias from a small part of the entire graph. Whereas a bias tends to be caused by the small part, straightforward extensions of previous studies cannot provide efficient bias mitigation owing to the use of the entire graph information. In this study, we propose Graph-target Treatment Effect Estimation (GraphTEE), a framework designed to estimate treatment effects specifically on graph-structured targets. GraphTEE aims to mitigate observational bias by focusing on confounding variable sets and consider a new regularization framework. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis on how GraphTEE performs better in terms of bias mitigation. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。