arXiv:2509.05775stat.MLcs.LG2025-09被引 1

用因果森林生成相似性矩阵,聚类发现对治疗反应不同的潜在人群

Causal Clustering for Conditional Average Treatment Effects Estimation and Subgroup Discovery

  • 基于因果森林学习治疗反应相似性,构建用于聚类的核矩阵
  • 在真实和模拟数据上识别出具有显著差异的治疗响应子群
  • 适合个性化医疗、政策评估等需要分群决策的研究者

在个性化医疗、资源分配和政策评估等领域,估计异质性治疗效应至关重要。核心挑战在于识别对干预反应不同的子群体,以实现更精准有效的决策。尽管聚类方法在无监督学习中已广泛应用,但其与因果推断的结合仍有限。本文提出一种新框架,利用因果森林学习的核函数,基于估计的条件平均处理效应(CATE)对个体进行聚类,揭示潜在子群结构。方法分为两步:首先通过正交化学习器与Robinson分解,得到无偏的CATE估计值,构建编码样本间治疗响应相似性的核矩阵;其次在此矩阵上应用核聚类,发现具有不同治疗敏感性的子群,并计算各聚类的平均CATE。我们将该聚类步骤视为残差-残差回归框架中的正则化形式。在半合成及真实数据集上的大量实验,包括消融研究和探索性分析,验证了该方法在捕捉有意义的治疗效应异质性方面的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects is critical in domains such as personalized medicine, resource allocation, and policy evaluation. A central challenge lies in identifying subpopulations that respond differently to interventions, thereby enabling more targeted and effective decision-making. While clustering methods are well-studied in unsupervised learning, their integration with causal inference remains limited. We propose a novel framework that clusters individuals based on estimated treatment effects using a learned kernel derived from causal forests, revealing latent subgroup structures. Our approach consists of two main steps. First, we estimate debiased Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATEs) using orthogonalized learners via the Robinson decomposition, yielding a kernel matrix that encodes sample-level similarities in treatment responsiveness. Second, we apply kernelized clustering to this matrix to uncover distinct, treatment-sensitive subpopulations and compute cluster-level average CATEs. We present this kernelized clustering step as a form of regularization within the residual-on-residual regression framework. Through extensive experiments on semi-synthetic and real-world datasets, supported by ablation studies and exploratory analyses, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in capturing meaningful treatment effect heterogeneity.

因果推断聚类分析治疗效应子群发现

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