arXiv:2608.01352cs.LGcs.AI2026-08

解决时空数据中隐藏混杂与干扰下的因果推断难题。

Spatiotemporal Proximal Causal Inference under Hidden Confounding and Interference

论文配图:Spatiotemporal Proximal Causal Inference under Hidden Confounding and Interference
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 引入治疗与结果诱导的代理变量,捕捉局部及邻域混杂信息。
  • 在隐性混杂和时空干扰下,实现潜在结果的可识别估计。
  • 适用于气候、环境政策等存在空间依赖性的领域研究者。

从真实世界时空数据中估计因果效应面临隐藏混杂和干扰的挑战。标准因果识别方法假设给定可观测协变量后满足条件交换性,但在隐藏混杂同时影响处理与结果的场景下失效,这在气候、环境政策、流行病学和区域经济学中十分常见。本文提出一种新颖的时空近端因果推断框架,将近端识别理论拓展至时空设置。该方法通过引入治疗与结果诱导的代理变量,联合捕捉局部与邻域水平的混杂信息,并推导出无需直接恢复隐藏混杂因子的时空结果混杂桥函数。在代理排除限制与时空完备性条件下,建立了该桥函数的可识别性,并证明所提估计器通过近端推广的g-计算公式恢复结果。为实现这一识别结果,我们设计了一种基于Transformer的时空编码器神经架构——结合条件互信息判别器以强制排除限制,以及矩匹配网络以保证学习到的桥函数满足识别方程。此外,引入稳定加权方案以缓解处理支持不平衡问题。合成数据实验表明,本方法性能媲美基线因果推断方法,且据我们所知,首次在时空干扰存在下,基于近端因果推断框架提供了对隐藏混杂的理论支撑结果。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Estimating causal effects from real-world spatiotemporal data is challenging due to hidden confounders and interference. Standard causal identification methods assume conditional exchangeability given observed covariates, which fails whenever hidden confounders affect both treatment and outcomes - a common setting in domains such as climate, environmental policy, epidemiology, and regional economics. In this paper, we propose a novel spatiotemporal proximal causal inference framework that extends proximal identification theory to spatiotemporal settings. The proposed method jointly captures local and neighborhood-level confounding information by introducing treatment- and outcome-inducing proxies, and we derive a spatiotemporal outcome confounding bridge function that identifies the potential outcome without requiring direct recovery of the hidden confounder. We establish the identifiability of this bridge function under proxy exclusion restrictions and a spatiotemporal completeness condition, and show that the resulting estimator recovers the outcome through a proximal generalization of the g-computation formula. To operationalize this identification result, we propose a neural architecture that learns proxies via transformer-based spatiotemporal encoders - coupled with a conditional mutual information critic to enforce exclusion restrictions and a moment-matching network to guarantee that the learned bridge function satisfies the underlying identifying equation. We further introduce a stabilized weighting scheme to address treatment support imbalance. Experiments on synthetic datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable performance to baseline causal inference methods, while providing, to our knowledge, the first theoretically grounded outcomes for the hidden confounding in the presence of spatiotemporal interference through a proximal causal inference framework.

因果推断时空建模近端识别隐藏混杂

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。