arXiv:2508.07221cs.LGcs.AI2025-08被引 2

用大模型自动发现隐藏混杂因素,提升医学因果推断准确性。

LLM-based Agents for Automated Confounder Discovery and Subgroup Analysis in Causal Inference

  • 用大模型代理模拟专家思维,自动识别潜在混杂因子
  • 在真实医疗数据上缩小置信区间,发现未被察觉的混杂偏差
  • 适合需要可解释因果推断的医疗与社会科学领域

从观察数据中估计个体化治疗效应面临未测量混杂和结构偏差的持续挑战。因果机器学习方法如因果树和双重稳健估计器虽能估计条件平均治疗效应,但在复杂现实环境中因存在潜在混杂或以非结构化形式描述的混杂因子而效果受限。此外,依赖领域专家进行混杂因子识别和规则解释带来高标注成本与可扩展性问题。本文提出基于大语言模型的代理框架,将代理集成至因果机器学习流程中,模拟领域专家知识,系统性地完成亚组识别与混杂结构发现。该方法在保持可解释性的前提下降低对人工干预的依赖。在真实世界医疗数据集上的实验表明,所提方法通过缩小置信区间并揭示未被察觉的混杂偏差,提升了治疗效应估计的鲁棒性。研究结果表明,基于大模型的代理为可扩展、可信且语义感知的因果推断提供了有前景的路径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Estimating individualized treatment effects from observational data presents a persistent challenge due to unmeasured confounding and structural bias. Causal Machine Learning (causal ML) methods, such as causal trees and doubly robust estimators, provide tools for estimating conditional average treatment effects. These methods have limited effectiveness in complex real-world environments due to the presence of latent confounders or those described in unstructured formats. Moreover, reliance on domain experts for confounder identification and rule interpretation introduces high annotation cost and scalability concerns. In this work, we proposed Large Language Model-based agents for automated confounder discovery and subgroup analysis that integrate agents into the causal ML pipeline to simulate domain expertise. Our framework systematically performs subgroup identification and confounding structure discovery by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of LLM-based agents, which reduces human dependency while preserving interpretability. Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that our proposed approach enhances treatment effect estimation robustness by narrowing confidence intervals and uncovering unrecognized confounding biases. Our findings suggest that LLM-based agents offer a promising path toward scalable, trustworthy, and semantically aware causal inference.

因果推断大模型应用医疗AI

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