Disentangled latent factors for muti-cause treatment effect estimation

Abstract

Abstract Existing methods estimate treatment effects from observational data and assume that covariates are all confounders. However, observed covariates may not directly represent confounding variables that influence both treatment and outcome. They always include variables that only affect the treatment or the outcome. In addition, for multi-dimensional binary treatments, disentangled methods are mainly designed for binary variables and ignore the impact of multi-cause treatment variables on the inference of latent factors. To address these two issues, based on variable decomposition and proxy inference, we propose the Disentangled Latent Factors for Multi-cause Treatment Estimation (DEMTE) algorithm. It utilizes an identifiable autoencoder to infer and disentangle latent factors based on the joint distribution of variables in observational data. DEMTE evaluates the treatment effect on the disentangled factors. Synthetic experiments and semi-synthetic experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the inference and disentanglement techniques and our method achieves more accurate treatment effect estimation.