首个可生成时序反事实结果分布的因果扩散模型,无需额外去混杂处理。
Causal Diffusion Models for Counterfactual Outcome Distributions in Longitudinal Data

- 基于残差去噪架构与关系自注意力,捕捉复杂时序依赖。
- 在高混杂下分布准确率提升15-30%(1-Wasserstein距离),点估计误差保持优秀。
- 适合医学决策、政策评估等需不确定性量化场景。
在纵向数据中预测反事实结果极具挑战性,因治疗决策随患者状态动态演变,且存在复杂的时变混杂因素,现有方法常缺乏可靠的不确定性量化。本文提出因果扩散模型(CDM),首个专为生成序列干预下完整反事实结果分布而设计的去噪扩散概率模型。CDM采用新颖的残差去噪架构与关系自注意力机制,能有效捕捉复杂的时间依赖性与多模态结果轨迹,无需显式调整(如逆概率加权或对抗平衡)即可应对混杂。在广泛使用的药代动力学-药效学肿瘤生长模拟器上,CDM在多个基准测试中持续优于现有最优纵向因果推断方法:分布准确率(1-Wasserstein距离)相对提升15%-30%,同时在高混杂条件下点估计误差(RMSE)保持竞争力或更优。该模型统一了不确定性量化与鲁棒反事实预测,在无需定制化去混杂的前提下,为医疗决策支持、政策评估等纵向领域提供灵活高效工具。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Predicting counterfactual outcomes in longitudinal data, where sequential treatment decisions heavily depend on evolving patient states, is critical yet notoriously challenging due to complex time-dependent confounding and inadequate uncertainty quantification in existing methods. We introduce the Causal Diffusion Model (CDM), the first denoising diffusion probabilistic approach explicitly designed to generate full probabilistic distributions of counterfactual outcomes under sequential interventions. CDM employs a novel residual denoising architecture with relational self-attention, capturing intricate temporal dependencies and multimodal outcome trajectories without requiring explicit adjustments (e.g., inverse-probability weighting or adversarial balancing) for confounding. In rigorous evaluation on a pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic tumor-growth simulator widely adopted in prior work, CDM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art longitudinal causal inference methods, achieving a 15-30% relative improvement in distributional accuracy (1-Wasserstein distance) while maintaining competitive or superior point-estimate accuracy (RMSE) under high-confounding regimes. By unifying uncertainty quantification and robust counterfactual prediction in complex, sequentially confounded settings, without tailored deconfounding, CDM offers a flexible, high-impact tool for decision support in medicine, policy evaluation, and other longitudinal domains.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。