Abstract

Networked observational data presents new opportunities for learning individual causal effects, which plays an indispensable role in decision making. Such data poses the challenge of confounding bias. Previous work presents two desiderata to handle confounding bias. On the treatment group level, we aim to balance the distributions of confounder representations. On the individual level, it is desirable to capture patterns of hidden confounders that predict treatment assignments. Existing methods show the potential of utilizing network information to handle confounding bias, but they only try to satisfy one of the two desiderata. This is because the two desiderata seem to contradict each other. When the two distributions of confounder representations are highly overlapped, then we confront the undiscriminating problem between the treated and the controlled. In this work, we formulate the two desiderata as a minimax game. We propose IGNITE that learns representations of confounders from networked observational data, which is trained by a minimax game to achieve the two desiderata. Experiments verify the efficacy of IGNITE on two datasets under various settings.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2020
EditorsChristian Bessiere
PublisherInternational Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
Pages4534-4540
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9780999241165
StatePublished - 2020
Event29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2020 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: Jan 1 2021 → …

Publication series

NameIJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume2021-January
ISSN (Print)1045-0823

Conference

Conference29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2020
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period1/1/21 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence

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