论文标题
分裂治疗分析以对前瞻性干预的异质因果效应进行排名
Split-Treatment Analysis to Rank Heterogeneous Causal Effects for Prospective Interventions
论文作者
论文摘要
对于多种干预措施,例如新的广告,营销干预或功能建议,重要的是针对特定人群以最大程度地以最低成本或潜在的伤害来最大化其收益。但是,一个关键的挑战是,由于尚未部署这种前瞻性干预措施的效果,没有任何数据可用。在这项工作中,我们提出了一项分裂治疗分析,该分析对最有可能使用过去的观察数据的前瞻性干预构成积极影响。与标准因果推理方法不同,分裂处理方法本身不需要任何目标治疗方法。取而代之的是,它依赖于目标治疗引起的代理处理的观察结果。在合理的假设下,我们表明,基于代理治疗的异质因果效应的排名与基于目标治疗的效果的排名相同。在没有任何干预数据以进行交叉验证的情况下,分裂处理使用灵敏度分析来选择未观察的混杂来选择模型参数。我们对模拟数据和大规模,现实世界的定位任务进行分配处理,并通过后者的随机实验来验证我们发现的排名。
For many kinds of interventions, such as a new advertisement, marketing intervention, or feature recommendation, it is important to target a specific subset of people for maximizing its benefits at minimum cost or potential harm. However, a key challenge is that no data is available about the effect of such a prospective intervention since it has not been deployed yet. In this work, we propose a split-treatment analysis that ranks the individuals most likely to be positively affected by a prospective intervention using past observational data. Unlike standard causal inference methods, the split-treatment method does not need any observations of the target treatments themselves. Instead it relies on observations of a proxy treatment that is caused by the target treatment. Under reasonable assumptions, we show that the ranking of heterogeneous causal effect based on the proxy treatment is the same as the ranking based on the target treatment's effect. In the absence of any interventional data for cross-validation, Split-Treatment uses sensitivity analyses for unobserved confounding to select model parameters. We apply Split-Treatment to both a simulated data and a large-scale, real-world targeting task and validate our discovered rankings via a randomized experiment for the latter.