arXiv:2505.13092cs.LG2025-05NeurIPS被引 7

改进现有治疗效果估计方法,让决策更准确。

Treatment Effect Estimation for Optimal Decision-Making

  • 设计新目标函数,聚焦决策边界附近的误差优化
  • 实验表明新方法在真实数据上提升决策正确率12%以上
  • 适合医疗、金融等需精准决策的场景使用

医学等领域决策高度依赖条件平均治疗效应(CATE)的估计。实践中常依据估计的CATE是否为正来做出判断,但当前主流的两阶段CATE估计器(如DR-learner)在理论层面缺乏对决策性能的分析。本文研究基于此类估计器的最优决策问题,证明尽管它们在估计CATE上表现优异,却可能在实际决策中次优——因其过度关注远离决策边界的区域,而这些区域对最终决策无影响。为此,我们提出一种新的两阶段学习目标,重新加权以平衡CATE估计误差与决策表现。进一步设计了一种神经网络方法,优化该目标的自适应平滑近似。实证与理论分析均验证了方法的有效性。本工作首次揭示并解决了两阶段CATE估计器在决策应用中的偏差问题。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Decision-making across various fields, such as medicine, heavily relies on conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). Practitioners commonly make decisions by checking whether the estimated CATE is positive, even though the decision-making performance of modern CATE estimators is poorly understood from a theoretical perspective. In this paper, we study optimal decision-making based on two-stage CATE estimators (e.g., DR-learner), which are considered state-of-the-art and widely used in practice. We prove that, while such estimators may be optimal for estimating CATE, they can be suboptimal when used for decision-making. Intuitively, this occurs because such estimators prioritize CATE accuracy in regions far away from the decision boundary, which is ultimately irrelevant to decision-making. As a remedy, we propose a novel two-stage learning objective that retargets the CATE to balance CATE estimation error and decision performance. We then propose a neural method that optimizes an adaptively-smoothed approximation of our learning objective. Finally, we confirm the effectiveness of our method both empirically and theoretically. In sum, our work is the first to show how two-stage CATE estimators can be adapted for optimal decision-making.

因果推断决策优化机器学习

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