TY - JOUR
T1 - Causal estimation with functional confounders
AU - Puli, Aahlad
AU - Perotte, Adler J.
AU - Ranganath, Rajesh
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors were partly supported by NIH/NHLBI Award R01HL148248, and by NSF Award 1922658 NRT-HDR: FUTURE Foundations, Translation, and Responsibility for Data Science. The authors would like to thank Xintian Han, Raghav Singhal, Victor Veitch, Fredrik D. Johansson and the reviewers for thoughtful feedback. The authors would also like to thank Mukund Sudarshan and Prof. Sriram Sankararaman for help with running the GWAS experiments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Causal inference relies on two fundamental assumptions: ignorability and positivity. We study causal inference when the true confounder value can be expressed as a function of the observed data; we call this setting estimation with functional confounders (EFC). In this setting ignorability is satisfied, however positivity is violated, and causal inference is impossible in general. We consider two scenarios where causal effects are estimable. First, we discuss interventions on a part of the treatment called functional interventions and a sufficient condition for effect estimation of these interventions called functional positivity. Second, we develop conditions for nonparametric effect estimation based on the gradient fields of the functional confounder and the true outcome function. To estimate effects under these conditions, we develop Level-set Orthogonal Descent Estimation (LODE). Further, we prove error bounds on LODE’s effect estimates, evaluate our methods on simulated and real data, and empirically demonstrate the value of EFC.
AB - Causal inference relies on two fundamental assumptions: ignorability and positivity. We study causal inference when the true confounder value can be expressed as a function of the observed data; we call this setting estimation with functional confounders (EFC). In this setting ignorability is satisfied, however positivity is violated, and causal inference is impossible in general. We consider two scenarios where causal effects are estimable. First, we discuss interventions on a part of the treatment called functional interventions and a sufficient condition for effect estimation of these interventions called functional positivity. Second, we develop conditions for nonparametric effect estimation based on the gradient fields of the functional confounder and the true outcome function. To estimate effects under these conditions, we develop Level-set Orthogonal Descent Estimation (LODE). Further, we prove error bounds on LODE’s effect estimates, evaluate our methods on simulated and real data, and empirically demonstrate the value of EFC.
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85108436522
VL - 2020-December
JO - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
JF - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
SN - 1049-5258
T2 - 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020
Y2 - 6 December 2020 through 12 December 2020
ER -