提出预测-干预博弈框架,用稳定毯子提升预测鲁棒性。
Prediction-Intervention Games and Invariant Sets

- 构建领导者预测与追随者干预的双人博弈模型
- 基于稳定毯子的预测优于或等同于因果父节点预测
- 适用于因果图已知或未知的现实场景
我们研究一种两人博弈:领导者利用观测数据从协变量中选择响应变量Y的预测函数,追随者随后在潜在结构因果模型中对某些协变量进行干预以最大化自身目标。领导者知道干预目标,但可能不了解追随者的具体目标。此设置称为预测-干预博弈,是斯塔克尔伯格博弈的特例。寻找领导者的最优策略通常很困难。为避免性能严重下降,领导者可基于Y的因果父母,或更一般地基于一个不变协变量子集进行预测。我们证明,在两类常见追随者目标下,基于稳定毯(特定不变子集)的预测器始终优于或等同于基于因果父母的预测器。我们进一步将领导者干预后的风险上界表示为允许干预下的最坏情况风险,并强化了现有分布泛化结果:给出稳定毯预测器为最坏情况最优的充分条件,并通过例子表明这些条件通常不可省略。最后,我们讨论了因果图已知和未知情形下的实用策略,并在模拟和真实数据上进行了测试。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We consider the following two-player game: using observational data, the leader chooses a prediction function for a response variable $Y$ from given covariates. The follower then reacts with an intervention on some covariates in the underlying structural causal model to maximize their own objective. The leader knows the intervention targets, but may have limited knowledge of the follower's objective. We call this setup a prediction-intervention game, a special case of a Stackelberg game. Finding an optimal strategy for the leader is generally difficult. To avoid severe performance loss, the leader may base their prediction on the causal parents of $Y$, or more generally on an invariant subset of covariates. We prove, for two common classes of follower objectives, that predictors based on the stable blanket, a specific invariant subset, are always better or as good as those based on the causal parents. We further upper bound the leader's post-intervention risk by a worst-case risk over allowed interventions and strengthen existing distribution generalization results to analyze this bound: we give sufficient conditions under which stable-blanket predictors are worst-case optimal, and show by examples that these conditions cannot in general be dropped. Finally, we discuss practical strategies for settings with known and unknown graph, and test them on simulated and real-world data.
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