Causal Inference from Small High-dimensional Datasets

Many methods have been proposed to estimate treatment effects with observational data. Often, the choice of the method considers the application's characteristics, such as type of treatment and outcome, confounding effect, and the complexity of the data. These methods implicitly assume that the sample size is large enough to train such models, especially the neural network-based estimators. What if this is not the case? In this work, we propose Causal-Batle, a methodology to estimate treatment effects in small high-dimensional datasets in the presence of another high-dimensional dataset in the same feature space. We adopt an approach that brings transfer learning techniques into causal inference. Our experiments show that such an approach helps to bring stability to neural network-based methods and improve the treatment effect estimates in small high-dimensional datasets.

M3E2: Multi-gate Mixture-of-experts for Multi-treatment Effect Estimation

This work proposes the M3E2, a multi-task learning neural network model to estimate the effect of multiple treatments. In contrast to existing methods, M3E2 is robust to multiple treatment effects applied simultaneously to the same unit, continuous and binary treatments, and many covariates. We compared M3E2 with three baselines in three synthetic benchmark datasets: two with multiple treatments and one with one treatment. Our analysis showed that our method has superior performance, making more assertive estimations of the true treatment effects. The code is available at github.com/raquelaoki/M3E2.

Heterogeneous Multi-task Learning with Expert Diversity

Predicting multiple heterogeneous biological and medical targets is a challenge for traditional deep learning models. In contrast to single-task learning, in which a separate model is trained for each target, multi-task learning (MTL) optimizes a single model to predict multiple related targets simultaneously. To address this challenge, we propose the Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts with Exclusivity (MMoEEx). Our work aims to tackle the heterogeneous MTL setting, in which the same model optimizes multiple tasks with different characteristics. Such a scenario can overwhelm current MTL approaches due to the challenges in balancing shared and task-specific representations and the need to optimize tasks with competing optimization paths. Our method makes two key contributions: first, we introduce an approach to induce more diversity among experts, thus creating representations more suitable for highly imbalanced and heterogenous MTL learning; second, we adopt a two-step optimization [6, 11] approach to balancing the tasks at the gradient level. We validate our method on three MTL benchmark datasets, including Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) and PubChem BioAssay (PCBA).

ParKCa: Causal Inference with Partially Known Causes

Causal Inference methods based on observational data are an alternative for applications where collecting the counterfactual data or realizing a more standard experiment is not possible. In this work, our goal is to combine several observational causal inference methods to learn new causes in applications where some causes are well known. We validate the proposed method on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset to identify genes that potentially cause metastasis.