研究如何分析非结构化数据的因果影响,找出最受影响的特征。
Causal Inference with Unstructured Outcomes

- 通过学习特征评分函数,识别治疗对非结构化结果影响最大的特征。
- 在文本和图像数据上验证,能有效捕捉治疗引起的显著变化。
- 适用于医疗笔记、问卷回复等复杂输出场景,适合临床与社科研究者。
传统因果推断聚焦于标量结果,如患者是否康复、工人收入多少或网站访问次数。现代研究越来越多关注具有更丰富形式的结果,如临床记录、开放式调查回答和图像。例如,医院可能想知道人工智能文档工具如何改变医生书写的病历,或护士培训项目如何影响患者在问卷中的表述。对于这类结果,传统的平均处理效应无意义:无法对一段文字或一张图片进行有意义的相减。为此,我们提出一种针对非结构化结果的因果查询。核心思想是学习哪些结果特征最受治疗影响,称为最大对比特征(MCF)。为估计MCF,我们学习一个特征评分函数,将每个结果映射为标量,并揭示处理组与对照组潜在结果之间的最显著差异。我们建立了识别条件和估计算法,并通过让特征评分函数依赖可观测协变量,扩展至异质性效应。此外,我们还处理了治疗和结果均为非结构化的情形。在文本和图像上的实证研究表明,该算法能准确恢复治疗引起的关键变化特征。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Causal inference has traditionally centered on scalar outcomes: whether a patient recovers, how much a worker earns, or how many visits a website receives. Modern studies increasingly ask causal questions about outcomes with richer form, such as clinical notes, open-ended survey responses, and images. A hospital may want to know how an AI documentation tool changes the notes physicians write, or how a nurse training program alters what patients say in survey responses. For such outcomes, the usual average treatment effect is ill-defined: one cannot meaningfully subtract one text or image from another. To this end, we propose a causal query for unstructured outcomes. The key idea is to learn what features of the outcome are most causally affected by the treatment, which we call the maximally contrasting feature (MCF). To estimate the MCF, we learn a feature-scoring function that maps each outcome to a scalar and exposes the sharpest contrast between treated and control potential outcomes. We develop identification conditions and estimation algorithms for this query, and extend it to heterogeneous effects by allowing the feature-scoring function to depend on observed covariates. We also handle settings where both the treatment and the outcome are unstructured. Empirical studies on text and images show that the algorithm recovers salient aspects of an outcome changed by a treatment.
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