Disentangled Representation via Variational AutoEncoder for Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation
This addresses treatment effect estimation in fields like healthcare and military, but is incremental as it extends disentanglement methods from binary to continuous treatments.
The paper tackles continuous treatment effect estimation by proposing DRVAE, a variational autoencoder that disentangles covariates into instrumental, confounding, adjustment, and noise factors to balance confounding factors for dose-response curves. Results on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets show it outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Continuous treatment effect estimation holds significant practical importance across various decision-making and assessment domains, such as healthcare and the military. However, current methods for estimating dose-response curves hinge on balancing the entire representation by treating all covariates as confounding variables. Although various approaches disentangle covariates into different factors for treatment effect estimation, they are confined to binary treatment settings. Moreover, observational data are often tainted with non-causal noise information that is imperceptible to the human. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel Dose-Response curve estimator via Variational AutoEncoder (DRVAE) disentangled covariates representation. Our model is dedicated to disentangling covariates into instrumental factors, confounding factors, adjustment factors, and external noise factors, thereby facilitating the estimation of treatment effects under continuous treatment settings by balancing the disentangled confounding factors. Extensive results on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.