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From Text to Treatment Effects: A Meta-Learning Approach (arxiv.org)
1 point by hdvr on Sep 25, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Using fake data where hidden factors that sway treatment and outcome were written as text, they tested whether adding them to patient data improves estimates of how much a treatment helps. It helped most with more data, but never matched knowing the factors exactly.

Abstract · From Text to Treatment Effects: A Meta-Learning Approach to Handling Text-Based Confounding

One of the central goals of causal machine learning is the accurate estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data. In recent years, meta-learning has emerged as a flexible, model-agnostic paradigm for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) using any supervised model. This paper examines the performance of meta-learners when the confounding variables are expressed in text. Through synthetic data experiments, we show that learners using pre-trained text representations of confounders, in addition to tabular background variables, achieve improved CATE estimates compared to those relying solely on the tabular variables, particularly when sufficient data is available. However, due to the entangled nature of the text embeddings, these models do not fully match the performance of meta-learners with perfect confounder knowledge. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of pre-trained text representations for causal inference and open up interesting avenues for future research.

Henri Arno, Paloma Rabaey, Thomas Demeester
arXiv:2409.15503 · cs.AI · submitted Sep 23, 2024 · updated Nov 13, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Presented at the NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Causal Representation Learning

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