arXiv:2511.16006cs.LGcs.AI2025-11

提出新框架联合去混淆与时间泛化,提升时序反事实预测精度。

Synergizing Deconfounding and Temporal Generalization For Time-series Counterfactual Outcome Estimation

  • 用迭代聚类识别细粒度治疗组,实现更精准的分布匹配去混淆
  • 随机掩码时间特征训练,使模型依赖历史模式而非噪声特征
  • 适合需要高可靠性决策的医疗时序分析场景

从时序观测中估计反事实结果对有效决策至关重要,例如何时给予救命治疗,但面临两大挑战:(i) 反事实轨迹从未被观测到;(ii) 混淆因子随时间演变,每一步都扭曲估计。为此,我们提出一个新框架,协同整合两种互补方法:子治疗组对齐(SGA)和随机时间掩码(RTM)。SGA 不再仅对齐潜空间中治疗的边缘分布,而是通过迭代治疗无关聚类识别细粒度子治疗组,对齐这些细粒度组可实现更优的分布匹配,从而提升去混淆效果。我们理论上证明了 SGA 优化了一个更紧的反事实风险上界,并实证验证其去混淆有效性。RTM 在训练中随机用高斯噪声替换输入协变量,促使模型减少对当前步骤可能噪声或虚假相关协变量的依赖,转而关注稳定的历史模式,从而增强跨时间的泛化能力并更好保留潜在因果关系。实验表明,单独使用 SGA 或 RTM 均能提升反事实结果估计性能,而两者协同组合始终达到最先进水平。成功源于二者不同但互补的作用:RTM 提升时间泛化性和时间步鲁棒性,而 SGA 改善每个时间点的去混淆能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Estimating counterfactual outcomes from time-series observations is crucial for effective decision-making, e.g. when to administer a life-saving treatment, yet remains significantly challenging because (i) the counterfactual trajectory is never observed and (ii) confounders evolve with time and distort estimation at every step. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that synergistically integrates two complementary approaches: Sub-treatment Group Alignment (SGA) and Random Temporal Masking (RTM). Instead of the coarse practice of aligning marginal distributions of the treatments in latent space, SGA uses iterative treatment-agnostic clustering to identify fine-grained sub-treatment groups. Aligning these fine-grained groups achieves improved distributional matching, thus leading to more effective deconfounding. We theoretically demonstrate that SGA optimizes a tighter upper bound on counterfactual risk and empirically verify its deconfounding efficacy. RTM promotes temporal generalization by randomly replacing input covariates with Gaussian noises during training. This encourages the model to rely less on potentially noisy or spuriously correlated covariates at the current step and more on stable historical patterns, thereby improving its ability to generalize across time and better preserve underlying causal relationships. Our experiments demonstrate that while applying SGA and RTM individually improves counterfactual outcome estimation, their synergistic combination consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. This success comes from their distinct yet complementary roles: RTM enhances temporal generalization and robustness across time steps, while SGA improves deconfounding at each specific time point.

反事实估计时序建模去混淆因果推断

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