Ping‐Hsun Wu

h-index25
2papers
1,957citations

2 Papers

4.1LGAug 10, 2025
LLM-based Agents for Automated Confounder Discovery and Subgroup Analysis in Causal Inference

Po-Han Lee, Yu-Cheng Lin, Chan-Tung Ku et al.

Estimating individualized treatment effects from observational data presents a persistent challenge due to unmeasured confounding and structural bias. Causal Machine Learning (causal ML) methods, such as causal trees and doubly robust estimators, provide tools for estimating conditional average treatment effects. These methods have limited effectiveness in complex real-world environments due to the presence of latent confounders or those described in unstructured formats. Moreover, reliance on domain experts for confounder identification and rule interpretation introduces high annotation cost and scalability concerns. In this work, we proposed Large Language Model-based agents for automated confounder discovery and subgroup analysis that integrate agents into the causal ML pipeline to simulate domain expertise. Our framework systematically performs subgroup identification and confounding structure discovery by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of LLM-based agents, which reduces human dependency while preserving interpretability. Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that our proposed approach enhances treatment effect estimation robustness by narrowing confidence intervals and uncovering unrecognized confounding biases. Our findings suggest that LLM-based agents offer a promising path toward scalable, trustworthy, and semantically aware causal inference.

1.2APJul 4, 2020
Discovering Drug-Drug and Drug-Disease Interactions Inducing Acute Kidney Injury Using Deep Rule Forests

Bowen Kuo, Yihuang Kang, Pinghsung Wu et al.

Patients with Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) increase mortality, morbidity, and long-term adverse events. Therefore, early identification of AKI may improve renal function recovery, decrease comorbidities, and further improve patients' survival. To control certain risk factors and develop targeted prevention strategies are important to reduce the risk of AKI. Drug-drug interactions and drug-disease interactions are critical issues for AKI. Typical statistical approaches cannot handle the complexity of drug-drug and drug-disease interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel learning algorithm, Deep Rule Forests (DRF), which discovers rules from multilayer tree models as the combinations of drug usages and disease indications to help identify such interactions. We found that several disease and drug usages are considered having significant impact on the occurrence of AKI. Our experimental results also show that the DRF model performs comparatively better than typical tree-based and other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy and model interpretability.