通过任务嵌入与平衡表示学习,更准确估计多治疗组合的因果效应。
Multiple Treatments Causal Effects Estimation with Task Embeddings and Balanced Representation Learning
- 用任务嵌入网络共享相关治疗的参数,提升模型泛化能力。
- 引入平衡惩罚项,减少不同治疗组间的表示差异,降低选择偏差。
- 适合医疗、营销等领域中需要分析多重干预效果的研究者。
多治疗同时应用在医疗、营销等领域日益普遍。准确估计单个治疗效应及治疗组合带来的交互效应至关重要。现有方法或缺乏相关治疗间的参数共享,或因冗余潜在变量降低因果效应估计精度。为此,我们提出一种新型深度学习框架,结合任务嵌入网络与带平衡惩罚的表示学习网络。任务嵌入网络通过编码单效应共性与交互特异性,实现相关治疗模式间的参数共享;表示学习网络则在不假设分布形式的前提下,从观测协变量中学习表示,并通过平衡惩罚减小不同治疗模式下表示分布的距离,从而缓解选择偏差并避免模型误设。模拟实验表明该方法优于现有基线,真实营销数据应用验证了其实际价值与实用性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The simultaneous application of multiple treatments is increasingly common in many fields, such as healthcare and marketing. In such scenarios, it is important to estimate the single treatment effects and the interaction treatment effects that arise from treatment combinations. Previous studies have proposed using independent outcome networks with subnetworks for interactions, or combining task embedding networks that capture treatment similarity with variational autoencoders. However, these methods suffer from the lack of parameter sharing among related treatments, or the estimation of unnecessary latent variables reduces the accuracy of causal effect estimation. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep learning framework that incorporates a task embedding network and a representation learning network with the balancing penalty. The task embedding network enables parameter sharing across related treatment patterns because it encodes elements common to single effects and contributions specific to interaction effects. The representation learning network with the balancing penalty learns representations nonparametrically from observed covariates while reducing distances in representation distributions across different treatment patterns. This process mitigates selection bias and avoids model misspecification. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing baselines, and application to real-world marketing datasets confirms the practical implications and utility of our framework.
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