Enhancing the Performance of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Systems

Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to predict sentiment polarity with fine granularity. While Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are widely utilized for sentimental feature extraction, their naive application for syntactic feature extraction can compromise information preservation. This study introduces an innovative edge-enhanced GCN, named SentiSys, to navigate the syntactic graph while preserving intact feature information, leading to enhanced performance. Specifically,we first integrate a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network and a self-attention-based transformer. This combination facilitates effective text encoding, preventing the loss of information and predicting long dependency text. A bidirectional GCN (Bi-GCN) with message passing is then employed to encode relationships between entities. Additionally, unnecessary information is filtered out using an aspect-specific masking technique. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we conduct extensive evaluation experiments and ablation studies on four benchmark datasets. The results consistently demonstrate improved performance in aspect-based sentiment analysis when employing SentiSys. This approach successfully addresses the challenges associated with syntactic feature extraction, highlighting its potential for advancing sentiment analysis methodologies.

Instrumental Variable Estimation for Causal Inference in Longitudinal Data with Time-Dependent Latent Confounders

Causal inference from longitudinal observational data is a challenging problem due to the difficulty in correctly identifying the time-dependent confounders, especially in the presence of latent time-dependent confounders. Instrumental variable (IV) is a powerful tool for addressing the latent confounders issue, but the traditional IV technique cannot deal with latent time-dependent confounders in longitudinal studies. In this work, we propose a novel Time-dependent Instrumental Factor Model (TIFM) for time-varying causal effect estimation from data with latent time-dependent confounders. At each time-step, the proposed TIFM method employs the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture to infer latent IV, and then uses the inferred latent IV factor for addressing the confounding bias caused by the latent time-dependent confounders. We provide a theoretical analysis for the proposed TIFM method regarding causal effect estimation in longitudinal data. Extensive evaluation with synthetic datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of TIFM in addressing causal effect estimation over time. We further apply TIFM to a climate dataset to showcase the potential of the proposed method in tackling real-world problems.

Disentangled Latent Representation Learning for Tackling the Confounding M-Bias Problem in Causal Inference

In causal inference, it is a fundamental task to estimate the causal effect from observational data. However, latent confounders pose major challenges in causal inference in observational data, for example, confounding bias and M-bias. Recent data-driven causal effect estimators tackle the confounding bias problem via balanced representation learning, but assume no M-bias in the system, thus they fail to handle the M-bias. In this paper, we identify a challenging and unsolved problem caused by a variable that leads to confounding bias and M-bias simultaneously. To address this problem with co-occurring M-bias and confounding bias, we propose a novel Disentangled Latent Representation learning framework for learning latent representations from proxy variables for unbiased Causal effect Estimation (DLRCE) from observational data. Specifically, DLRCE learns three sets of latent representations from the measured proxy variables to adjust for the confounding bias and M-bias. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate that DLRCE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art estimators in the case of the presence of both confounding bias and M-bias.

Causal Inference with Conditional Front-Door Adjustment and Identifiable Variational Autoencoder

An essential and challenging problem in causal inference is causal effect estimation from observational data. The problem becomes more difficult with the presence of unobserved confounding variables. The front-door adjustment is a practical approach for dealing with unobserved confounding variables. However, the restriction for the standard front-door adjustment is difficult to satisfy in practice. In this paper, we relax some of the restrictions by proposing the concept of conditional front-door (CFD) adjustment and develop the theorem that guarantees the causal effect identifiability of CFD adjustment. Furthermore, as it is often impossible for a CFD variable to be given in practice, it is desirable to learn it from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models, we propose CFDiVAE to learn the representation of the CFD adjustment variable directly from data with the identifiable Variational AutoEncoder and formally prove the model identifiability. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of CFDiVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of CFDiVAE is less sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounding variables. We further apply CFDiVAE to a real-world dataset to demonstrate its potential application.

Conditional Instrumental Variable Regression with Representation Learning for Causal Inference

This paper studies the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from observational data, in the presence of unobserved confounders. The two-stage least square (TSLS) method and its variants with a standard instrumental variable (IV) are commonly used to eliminate confounding bias, including the bias caused by unobserved confounders, but they rely on the linearity assumption. Besides, the strict condition of unconfounded instruments posed on a standard IV is too strong to be practical. To address these challenging and practical problems of the standard IV method (linearity assumption and the strict condition), in this paper, we use a conditional IV (CIV) to relax the unconfounded instrument condition of standard IV and propose a non-linear CIV regression with Confounding Balancing Representation Learning, CBRL.CIV, for jointly eliminating the confounding bias from unobserved confounders and balancing the observed confounders, without the linearity assumption. We theoretically demonstrate the soundness of CBRL.CIV. Extensive experiments on synthetic and two real-world datasets show the competitive performance of CBRL.CIV against state-of-the-art IV-based estimators and superiority in dealing with the non-linear situation.

Learning Conditional Instrumental Variable Representation for Causal Effect Estimation

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias caused by unmeasured confounders that affect both the treatment and the outcome. The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a powerful way to eliminate the confounding bias from latent confounders. However, the existing IV-based estimators require a nominated IV, and for a conditional IV (CIV) the corresponding conditioning set too, for causal effect estimation. This limits the application of IV-based estimators. In this paper, by leveraging the advantage of disentangled representation learning, we propose a novel method, named DVAE.CIV, for learning and disentangling the representations of CIV and the representations of its conditioning set for causal effect estimations from data with latent confounders. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DVAE.CIV method against the existing causal effect estimators.

Research And Implementation Of Drug Target Interaction Confidence Measurement Method Based On Causal Intervention

The identification and discovery of drug-target Interaction (DTI) is an important step in the field of Drug research and development, which can help scientists discover new drugs and accelerate the development process. KnowledgeGraph and the related knowledge graph Embedding (KGE) model develop rapidly and show good performance in the field of drug discovery in recent years. In the task of drug target identification, the lack of authenticity and accuracy of the model will lead to the increase of misjudgment rate and the low efficiency of drug development. To solve the above problems, this study focused on the problem of drug target link prediction with knowledge mapping as the core technology, and adopted the confidence measurement method based on causal intervention to measure the triplet score, so as to improve the accuracy of drug target interaction prediction model. By comparing with the traditional Softmax and Sigmod confidence measurement methods on different KGE models, the results show that the confidence measurement method based on causal intervention can effectively improve the accuracy of DTI link prediction, especially for high-precision models. The predicted results are more conducive to guiding the design and development of followup experiments of drug development, so as to improve the efficiency of drug development.

Ripple Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks For Recommendation Systems

Using knowledge graphs to assist deep learning models in making recommendation decisions has recently been proven to effectively improve the model's interpretability and accuracy. This paper introduces an end-to-end deep learning model, named RKGCN, which dynamically analyses each user's preferences and makes a recommendation of suitable items. It combines knowledge graphs on both the item side and user side to enrich their representations to maximize the utilization of the abundant information in knowledge graphs. RKGCN is able to offer more personalized and relevant recommendations in three different scenarios. The experimental results show the superior effectiveness of our model over 5 baseline models on three real-world datasets including movies, books, and music.

Causal Effect Estimation with Variational AutoEncoder and the Front Door Criterion

An essential problem in causal inference is estimating causal effects from observational data. The problem becomes more challenging with the presence of unobserved confounders. When there are unobserved confounders, the commonly used back-door adjustment is not applicable. Although the instrumental variable (IV) methods can deal with unobserved confounders, they all assume that the treatment directly affects the outcome, and there is no mediator between the treatment and the outcome. This paper aims to use the front-door criterion to address the challenging problem with the presence of unobserved confounders and mediators. In practice, it is often difficult to identify the set of variables used for front-door adjustment from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models in representation learning, we propose FDVAE to learn the representation of a Front-Door adjustment set with a Variational AutoEncoder, instead of trying to search for a set of variables for front-door adjustment. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of FDVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of FDVAE is not sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounders and is feasible in the case of dimensionality mismatch between learned representations and the ground truth. We further apply the method to three real-world datasets to demonstrate its potential applications.