用观测数据生成无偏反事实分布,提升医疗风险评估准确性
Debiased Counterfactual Generation via Flow Matching from Observations

- 从观测数据出发,通过去混杂流变换生成反事实分布
- 在弱混杂条件下保持统计接近性,支持高维不变特征迁移
- 适用于医疗决策、因果推断等需精准反事实分析的场景
在干预下的反事实分布估计是治疗风险评估和反事实生成任务的核心。现有方法将反事实分布视为独立生成目标,未利用其与观测数据的关联。本文证明,在标准假设下,观测与反事实结果分布具有相同支撑集和尾部行为,在弱混杂下保持统计接近性,并共享高维结果中对混杂因子不变的特征。这一性质启发我们不从零开始学习反事实分布,而是通过从观测分布出发的去混杂流进行建模。我们基于流匹配构建该问题,并推导出一种基于新型高效影响函数修正的半参数高效估计器。进一步,我们将估计器扩展至高维最小能量流,证明其在观测与反事实分布间可作为特别简洁的目标。实验表明,去混杂流优于现有去偏反事实分布估计方法,同时缓解了流模型已知的失败模式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Estimating counterfactual distributions under interventions is central to treatment risk assessment and counterfactual generation tasks. Existing approaches model the counterfactual distribution as a standalone generative target, without exploiting its relationship to the observational data. In this work, we show that under standard assumptions, observational and counterfactual outcome distributions are tightly linked: they have identical support and tail behavior, remain statistically close under weak confounding, and share any features of high-dimensional outcomes which are invariant to confounders. These properties motivate learning counterfactual distributions not from scratch, but via a deconfounding flow from the observational distribution. We formulate this problem via flow-matching and derive a semiparametrically efficient estimator based on a novel efficient influence function correction. We subsequently extend our estimator to target minimal-energy flows in high-dimensions, which we show can be especially simple targets between observational and counterfactual distributions. In experiments, deconfounding flows outperform existing debiased counterfactual distribution estimators, while also mitigating known failure modes of flow-based methods.
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