Counterfactual inference has become a ubiquitous tool in online advertisement, recommendation systems, medical diagnosis, and econometrics. Accurate modeling of outcome distributions associated with different interventions -- known as counterfactual distributions -- is crucial for the success of these applications. In this work, we propose to model counterfactual distributions using a novel Hilbert space representation called counterfactual mean embedding (CME). The CME embeds the associated counterfactual distribution into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) endowed with a positive definite kernel, which allows us to perform causal inference over the entire landscape of the counterfactual distribution. Based on this representation, we propose a distributional treatment effect (DTE) that can quantify the causal effect over entire outcome distributions. Our approach is nonparametric as the CME can be estimated under the unconfoundedness assumption from observational data without requiring any parametric assumption about the underlying distributions. Moreover, our framework allows for more complex outcomes such as images, sequences, and graphs. Our experimental results on synthetic data and off-policy evaluation tasks demonstrate the advantages of the proposed estimator.
Causal inference with counterfactual mean embeddings
Invited talk at Sophia Summit 2021, 17-19 Novembre 2021, Sophia Antipolis, France
Type:
Talk
City:
Sophia Antipolis
Date:
2021-11-18
Department:
Data Science
Eurecom Ref:
6722
Copyright:
© EURECOM. Personal use of this material is permitted. The definitive version of this paper was published in Invited talk at Sophia Summit 2021, 17-19 Novembre 2021, Sophia Antipolis, France and is available at :
See also:
PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/6722