Robust COVID-19 Detection in CT Images with CLIP

In the realm of medical imaging, particularly for COVID-19 detection, deep learning models face substantial challenges such as the necessity for extensive computational resources, the paucity of well-annotated datasets, and a significant amount of unlabeled data. In this work, we introduce the first lightweight detector designed to overcome these obstacles, leveraging a frozen CLIP image encoder and a trainable multilayer perception (MLP). Enhanced with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) for robustness and a loss landscape flattening strategy for improved generalization, our model is tailored for high efficacy in COVID-19 detection. Furthermore, we integrate a teacher-student framework to capitalize on the vast amounts of unlabeled data, enabling our model to achieve superior performance despite the inherent data limitations. Experimental results on the COV19-CT-DB dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing baseline by up to 10.6% in `macro' F1 score in supervised learning. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/COVID-19_Detection_M2_PURDUE.

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.

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.

Linking a predictive model to causal effect estimation

A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature on the outcome, i.e., how the outcome will change if the feature is changed while keeping the values of other features unchanged. This is because causal effect estimation requires interventional probabilities. However, many real world problems such as personalised decision making, recommendation, and fairness computing, need to know the causal effect of any feature on the outcome for a given instance. This is different from the traditional causal effect estimation problem with a fixed treatment variable. This paper first tackles the challenge of estimating the causal effect of any feature (as the treatment) on the outcome w.r.t. a given instance. The theoretical results naturally link a predictive model to causal effect estimations and imply that a predictive model is causally interpretable when the conditions identified in the paper are satisfied. The paper also reveals the robust property of a causally interpretable model. We use experiments to demonstrate that various types of predictive models, when satisfying the conditions identified in this paper, can estimate the causal effects of features as accurately as state-of-the-art causal effect estimation methods. We also show the potential of such causally interpretable predictive models for robust predictions and personalised decision making.

Causal Inference with Conditional Instruments using Deep Generative Models

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a widely used way to estimate the causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data with latent confounders. A standard IV is expected to be related to the treatment variable and independent of all other variables in the system. However, it is challenging to search for a standard IV from data directly due to the strict conditions. The conditional IV (CIV) method has been proposed to allow a variable to be an instrument conditioning on a set of variables, allowing a wider choice of possible IVs and enabling broader practical applications of the IV approach. Nevertheless, there is not a data-driven method to discover a CIV and its conditioning set directly from data. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose to learn the representations of the information of a CIV and its conditioning set from data with latent confounders for average causal effect estimation. By taking advantage of deep generative models, we develop a novel data-driven approach for simultaneously learning the representation of a CIV from measured variables and generating the representation of its conditioning set given measured variables. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method outperforms the existing IV methods.

Data-Driven Causal Effect Estimation Based on Graphical Causal Modelling: A Survey

In many fields of scientific research and real-world applications, unbiased estimation of causal effects from non-experimental data is crucial for understanding the mechanism underlying the data and for decision-making on effective responses or interventions. A great deal of research has been conducted on this challenging problem from different angles. For causal effect estimation in data, assumptions such as Markov property, faithfulness and causal sufficiency are always made. Under the assumptions, full knowledge such as, a set of covariates or an underlying causal graph, is still required. A practical challenge is that in many applications, no such full knowledge or only some partial knowledge is available. In recent years, research has emerged to use a search strategy based on graphical causal modelling to discover useful knowledge from data for causal effect estimation, with some mild assumptions, and has shown promose in tackling the practical challenge. In this survey, we review the methods and focus on the challenges the data-driven methods face. We discuss the assumptions, strengths and limitations of the data-driven methods. We hope this review will motivate more researchers to design better data-driven methods based on graphical causal modelling for the challenging problem of causal effect estimation.

Explanatory causal effects for model agnostic explanations

This paper studies the problem of estimating the contributions of features to the prediction of a specific instance by a machine learning model and the overall contribution of a feature to the model. The causal effect of a feature (variable) on the predicted outcome reflects the contribution of the feature to a prediction very well. A challenge is that most existing causal effects cannot be estimated from data without a known causal graph. In this paper, we define an explanatory causal effect based on a hypothetical ideal experiment. The definition brings several benefits to model agnostic explanations. First, explanations are transparent and have causal meanings. Second, the explanatory causal effect estimation can be data driven. Third, the causal effects provide both a local explanation for a specific prediction and a global explanation showing the overall importance of a feature in a predictive model. We further propose a method using individual and combined variables based on explanatory causal effects for explanations. We show the definition and the method work with experiments on some real-world data sets.

Dependency-based Anomaly Detection: Framework, Methods and Benchmark

Anomaly detection is an important research problem because anomalies often contain critical insights for understanding the unusual behavior in data. One type of anomaly detection approach is dependency-based, which identifies anomalies by examining the violations of the normal dependency among variables. These methods can discover subtle and meaningful anomalies with better interpretation. Existing dependency-based methods adopt different implementations and show different strengths and weaknesses. However, the theoretical fundamentals and the general process behind them have not been well studied. This paper proposes a general framework, DepAD, to provide a unified process for dependency-based anomaly detection. DepAD decomposes unsupervised anomaly detection tasks into feature selection and prediction problems. Utilizing off-the-shelf techniques, the DepAD framework can have various instantiations to suit different application domains. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted over one hundred instantiated DepAD methods with 32 real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of representative techniques in DepAD. To show the effectiveness of DepAD, we compare two DepAD methods with nine state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods, and the results show that DepAD methods outperform comparison methods in most cases. Through the DepAD framework, this paper gives guidance and inspiration for future research of dependency-based anomaly detection and provides a benchmark for its evaluation.

A general framework for causal classification

In many applications, there is a need to predict the effect of an intervention on different individuals from data. For example, which customers are persuadable by a product promotion? which groups would benefit from a new policy? These are typical causal classification questions involving the effect or the change in outcomes made by an intervention. The questions cannot be answered with traditional classification methods as they only deal with static outcomes. In marketing research these questions are often answered with uplift modelling, using experimental data. Some machine learning methods have been proposed for heterogeneous causal effect estimation using either experimental or observational data. In principle these methods can be used for causal classification, but a limited number of methods, mainly tree based, on causal heterogeneity modelling, are inadequate for various real world applications. In this paper, we propose a general framework for causal classification, as a generalisation of both uplift modelling and causal heterogeneity modelling. When developing the framework, we have identified the conditions where causal classification in both observational and experimental data can be resolved by a naive solution using off-the-shelf classification methods, which supports flexible implementations for various applications. This result not only enables a practical way to solve the causal classification problem by using any existing classification method in the proposed framework, but also makes it possible to cross use the methods developed in both uplift modelling and causal heterogeneity modelling areas when the conditions are satisfied. Experiments have shown that our framework with off-the-shelf classification methods is as competitive as the tailor-designed uplift modelling and heterogeneous causal effect modelling methods.