arXiv:2603.03587stat.MEcs.LG2026-03

CausalMix可生成带已知反事实的合成数据,同时精细控制因果效应异质性等关键因素。

Controllable Generative Sandbox for Causal Inference

  • 用混合高斯潜变量与类型特异性解码器生成多类型表格数据
  • 在保持数据分布真实性的前提下,独立调节重叠度、混杂强度和处理效应异质性
  • 适用于评估因果推断方法的可靠性,特别适合医学治疗比较研究

因果推断中的方法验证与研究设计依赖于具有已知反事实的合成数据。现有模拟器在分布真实性(涵盖连续、二值、分类变量)与因果可控性之间存在权衡。本文提出CausalMix,一种变分生成框架,通过混合高斯潜先验与数据类型特异性解码器,实现对混合型表格数据的高保真生成。模型引入显式因果控制机制:通过重叠正则化调节倾向得分分布,并直接参数化混杂强度与处理效应异质性。统一目标函数在保留观测数据拟合度的同时,支持因子式操控因果机制,使重叠度、混杂强度与处理效应异质性可在设计阶段独立调节。在多个基准上,CausalMix在混合类型表数据上达到最先进的分布指标,同时提供稳定、细粒度的因果控制。我们在转移性去势抵抗性前列腺癌治疗的对比安全性研究中展示了其应用价值,利用CausalMix在校准的数据生成过程中比较估计器表现,调优超参数,并针对特定效应异质性场景进行基于模拟的效能分析。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Method validation and study design in causal inference rely on synthetic data with known counterfactuals. Existing simulators trade off distributional realism, the ability to capture mixed-type and multimodal tabular data, against causal controllability, including explicit control over overlap, unmeasured confounding, and treatment effect heterogeneity. We introduce CausalMix, a variational generative framework that closes this gap by coupling a mixture of Gaussian latent priors with data-type-specific decoders for continuous, binary, and categorical variables. The model incorporates explicit causal controls: an overlap regularizer shaping propensity-score distributions, alongside direct parameterizations of confounding strength and effect heterogeneity. This unified objective preserves fidelity to the observed data while enabling factorial manipulation of causal mechanisms, allowing overlap, confounding strength, and treatment effect heterogeneity to be varied independently at design time. Across benchmarks, CausalMix achieves state-of-the-art distributional metrics on mixed-type tables while providing stable, fine-grained causal control. We demonstrate practical utility in a comparative safety study of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer treatments, using CausalMix to compare estimators under calibrated data-generating processes, tune hyperparameters, and conduct simulation-based power analyses under targeted treatment effect heterogeneity scenarios.

因果推断生成模型合成数据医学研究

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