LGMEMar 28

Maximin Learning of Individualized Treatment Effect on Multi-Domain Outcomes

arXiv:2603.2711415.2h-index: 3
AI Analysis

For precision mental health, DRIFT addresses the problem of ITE estimation being sensitive to symptom selection, offering robust treatment decisions across multiple clinical domains.

DRIFT proposes a maximin framework for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) that are robust to unmeasured clinical domains, using latent factor representations and adversarial learning. In the EMBARC trial for depression, DRIFT achieved superior generalizability to external multi-domain outcomes, including side effects and self-reported symptoms not used during training.

Precision mental health requires treatment decisions that account for heterogeneous symptoms reflecting multiple clinical domains. However, existing methods for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) rely on a single summary outcome or a specific set of observed symptoms or measures, which are sensitive to symptom selection and limit generalizability to unmeasured yet clinically relevant domains. We propose DRIFT, a new maximin framework for estimating robust ITEs from high-dimensional item-level data by leveraging latent factor representations and adversarial learning. DRIFT learns latent constructs via generalized factor analysis, then constructs an anchored on-target uncertainty set that extrapolates beyond the observed measures to approximate the broader hyper-population of potential outcomes. By optimizing worst-case performance over this uncertainty set, DRIFT yields ITEs that are robust to underrepresented or unmeasured domains. We further show that DRIFT is invariant to admissible reparameterizations of the latent factors and admits a closed-form maximin solution, with theoretical guarantees for identification and convergence. In analyses of a randomized controlled trial for major depressive disorder (EMBARC), DRIFT demonstrates superior performance and improved generalizability to external multi-domain outcomes, including side effects and self-reported symptoms not used during training.

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