提出新模型精准捕捉图数据中邻居影响的差异性,提升个体治疗效果估计准确率。
Treatment Effect Estimation with Differentiated Networked Effect on Graph Data

- 引入双注意力机制自动识别邻居重要性,动态建模干扰作用。
- 设计消息放大器根据邻居规模调整影响强度,捕捉局部网络差异效应。
- 在三个真实图数据集上超越现有方法,适合医疗与商业决策场景。
从观测图数据中估计个体治疗效果(ITE)对商业和医学等领域决策至关重要。该任务因干扰现象而具有挑战性——个体结果可能受其邻居的处理和协变量影响。现有方法尝试建模此类干扰以实现准确的ITE估计,但常忽视一个关键问题:差异化网络效应(DNE),即由重要性和规模各异的邻居构成的局部网络所引发的影响。若未显式捕捉DNE,将导致干扰表征错误,进而造成不准确的ITE估计与错误决策。为此,我们提出一种新型干扰建模机制,包含两个局部注意力机制和一个消息放大器。局部注意力机制可自动估计不同邻居对干扰的贡献重要性,消息放大器则根据邻居规模调整干扰建模结果,从而有效捕捉DNE。在三个真实世界图数据集上的实验表明,所提方法显著优于现有方法,验证了显式建模DNE的重要性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Estimating individual treatment effect (ITE) from observational graph data is crucial for decision-making in the fields such as commerce and medicine. This task is challenging due to interference, where individual outcomes can be influenced by the treatments and covariates of their neighbors. Existing methods attempt to model such interference for accurate ITE estimation. However, a critical issue is often overlooked: differentiated networked effect (DNE), an effect caused by local networks consisting of neighbors with varying importance and scales. Capturing DNE is vital; otherwise, we will end up with imprecise ITE estimation due to an erroneous characterization of interference, which can result in misguided decisions. To address this challenge, we propose a novel interference modeling mechanism that incorporates two partial attention mechanisms and a message amplifier. The partial attention mechanisms automatically estimate the importance of different neighbors in contributing to interference, while the message amplifier adjusts the results of the interference modeling mechanism based on the scale of neighbors, all of which enables the model to capture DNE. Experiments on three real-world graphs demonstrate that our methods outperform existing approaches for ITE estimation from graph data, which corroborates the importance of explicitly capturing DNE.
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