An improved neural network model for treatment effect estimation
This work addresses causal inference for scientific and industrial applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing neural network approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of treatment effect estimation from observational data by proposing a neural network model that uses covariates and neighboring instances' outcomes, resulting in improved performance over state-of-the-art models.
Nowadays, in many scientific and industrial fields there is an increasing need for estimating treatment effects and answering causal questions. The key for addressing these problems is the wealth of observational data and the processes for leveraging this data. In this work, we propose a new model for predicting the potential outcomes and the propensity score, which is based on a neural network architecture. The proposed model exploits the covariates as well as the outcomes of neighboring instances in training data. Numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed model reports better treatment effect estimation performance compared to state-of-the-art models.