Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder with Uniform Treatment

Daniel Jiwoong Im, Kyunghyun Cho, Narges Razavian

Published 2021-11-16, updated 2022-09-20Version 2

Domain adaptation and covariate shift are big issues in deep learning and they ultimately affect any causal inference algorithms that rely on deep neural networks. Causal effect variational autoencoder (CEVAE) is trained to predict the outcome given observational treatment data and it suffers from the distribution shift at test time. In this paper, we introduce uniform treatment variational autoencoders (UTVAE) that are trained with uniform treatment distribution using importance sampling and show that using uniform treatment over observational treatment distribution leads to better causal inference by mitigating the distribution shift that occurs from training to test time. We also explore the combination of uniform and observational treatment distributions with inference and generative network training objectives to find a better training procedure for inferring treatment effects. Experimentally, we find that the proposed UTVAE yields better absolute average treatment effect error and precision in the estimation of heterogeneous effect error than the CEVAE on synthetic and IHDP datasets.