论文标题
通过可解释性的镜头对异质治疗效应模型进行基准测试
Benchmarking Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Models through the Lens of Interpretability
论文作者
论文摘要
估计治疗的个性化影响是一个复杂但普遍存在的问题。为了解决这个问题,机器学习(ML)关于异质治疗效果估计的最新发展引起了许多复杂的,但不透明的工具:由于它们的灵活性,模块化和学习受限的表示的能力,因此神经网络尤其成为了这一文献的核心。不幸的是,这种黑匣子的资产是有代价的:模型通常涉及无数的非平凡操作,因此很难理解他们所学到的知识。但是,了解这些模型可能至关重要 - 例如,在医学背景下,发现有关治疗效果的知识异质性可以在临床实践中为治疗处方提供信息。因此,在这项工作中,我们使用事后特征重要性方法来识别影响模型预测的功能。这使我们能够沿着以前的工作忽略的新重要维度评估治疗效应估计量:我们构建了一个基准测试环境,以经验研究个性化治疗效应模型鉴定预测协变量的能力 - 确定治疗差异反应的协变量。然后,我们的基准测量环境使我们能够对不同类型的治疗效果模型的优势和劣势提供新的见解,因为我们调节了针对治疗效应估计的不同挑战 - 例如预后与预测信息的比率,潜在结果的可能非线性以及混杂的存在和类型。
Estimating personalized effects of treatments is a complex, yet pervasive problem. To tackle it, recent developments in the machine learning (ML) literature on heterogeneous treatment effect estimation gave rise to many sophisticated, but opaque, tools: due to their flexibility, modularity and ability to learn constrained representations, neural networks in particular have become central to this literature. Unfortunately, the assets of such black boxes come at a cost: models typically involve countless nontrivial operations, making it difficult to understand what they have learned. Yet, understanding these models can be crucial -- in a medical context, for example, discovered knowledge on treatment effect heterogeneity could inform treatment prescription in clinical practice. In this work, we therefore use post-hoc feature importance methods to identify features that influence the model's predictions. This allows us to evaluate treatment effect estimators along a new and important dimension that has been overlooked in previous work: We construct a benchmarking environment to empirically investigate the ability of personalized treatment effect models to identify predictive covariates -- covariates that determine differential responses to treatment. Our benchmarking environment then enables us to provide new insight into the strengths and weaknesses of different types of treatment effects models as we modulate different challenges specific to treatment effect estimation -- e.g. the ratio of prognostic to predictive information, the possible nonlinearity of potential outcomes and the presence and type of confounding.