arXiv:2603.02015cs.LG2026-03被引 2

给表格生成模型加因果约束,让合成数据更适用于因果推断。

CausalWrap: Model-Agnostic Causal Constraint Wrappers for Tabular Synthetic Data

  • 用轻量后处理映射注入部分因果知识,不改动原始生成器。
  • 在真实医疗数据上将治疗效应误差降低63%,相关性保持良好。
  • 适合需因果分析的场景,如政策评估、医疗干预研究。

表格合成数据生成器通常仅匹配观测分布,虽在列相关性、预测准确率等常规指标上表现良好,却难以保留对因果分析和分布外推理至关重要的结构关系。当下游任务涉及因果推理(如估计处理效应、评估政策或检验中介路径)时,仅匹配观测分布不足:结构保真度与处理机制保持成为关键。本文提出模型无关的CausalWrap(CW),通过注入部分因果知识(可信边、禁止边、定性/单调约束)到任意预训练生成器(GAN、VAE或扩散模型)中,无需访问其内部结构。CW学习一个轻量级可微后处理修正映射,基于增强拉格朗日策略优化,并引入因果惩罚项。我们提供了理论结果,连接惩罚优化与约束满足,以及近似分解与联合分布控制的关系。在具有已知干预真值的模拟结构因果模型、半合成因果基准(IHDP和类ACIC套件)及真实世界重症监护数据集(MIMIC-IV,含专家提取的部分图)上验证了有效性。CW在多种基础生成器上均提升了因果保真度——例如在ACIC上平均处理效应(ATE)误差降低最高达63%,在ICU队列上使ATE一致性从0.00提升至0.38,同时基本保持传统性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Tabular synthetic data generators are typically trained to match observational distributions, which can yield high conventional utility (e.g., column correlations, predictive accuracy) yet poor preservation of structural relations relevant to causal analysis and out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning. When the downstream use of synthetic data involves causal reasoning -- estimating treatment effects, evaluating policies, or testing mediation pathways -- merely matching the observational distribution is insufficient: structural fidelity and treatment-mechanism preservation become essential. We propose CausalWrap (CW), a model-agnostic wrapper that injects partial causal knowledge (PCK) -- trusted edges, forbidden edges, and qualitative/monotonic constraints -- into any pretrained base generator (GAN, VAE, or diffusion model), without requiring access to its internals. CW learns a lightweight, differentiable post-hoc correction map applied to samples from the base generator, optimized with causal penalty terms under an augmented-Lagrangian schedule. We provide theoretical results connecting penalty-based optimization to constraint satisfaction and relating approximate factorization to joint distributional control. We validate CW on simulated structural causal models (SCMs) with known ground-truth interventions, semi-synthetic causal benchmarks (IHDP and an ACIC-style suite), and a real-world ICU cohort (MIMIC-IV) with expert-elicited partial graphs. CW improves causal fidelity across diverse base generators -- e.g., reducing average treatment effect (ATE) error by up to 63% on ACIC and lifting ATE agreement from 0.00 to 0.38 on the intensive care unit (ICU) cohort -- while largely retaining conventional utility.

因果生成合成数据表格数据医疗建模

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