Causal inference is essential for data-driven decision making across domains such as business engagement, medical treatment and policy making. However, research on causal discovery has evolved separately from inference methods, preventing straight-forward combination of methods from both fields. In this work, we develop Deep End-to-end Causal Inference (DECI), a single flow-based non-linear additive noise model that takes in observational data and can perform both causal discovery and inference, including conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. We provide a theoretical guarantee that DECI can recover the ground truth causal graph under standard causal discovery assumptions. Motivated by application impact, we extend this model to heterogeneous, mixed-type data with missing values, allowing for both continuous and discrete treatment decisions. Our results show the competitive performance of DECI when compared to relevant baselines for both causal discovery and (C)ATE estimation in over a thousand experiments on both synthetic datasets and causal machine learning benchmarks across data-types and levels of missingness.
翻译:因果关系推断对于在商业参与、医疗和决策等不同领域进行数据驱动决策至关重要。然而,因果发现研究与推断方法是分开的,防止了两个领域方法的直向组合。在这项工作中,我们开发了深端至端因果推断(DECI),这是一个单一的以流动为基础的非线性添加性噪音模型,在观察数据中采用,可以同时进行因果发现和推断,包括有条件平均处理效果(CATE)估计。我们提供了理论保证,DECI能够根据标准的因果发现假设恢复地面真相因果图表。我们受应用影响驱动,将这一模型推广到具有缺失值的多式混合型数据,允许连续和分散的治疗决定。我们的结果显示,在与相关的因果发现基线和(C)在1,000多个关于数据类型和缺失程度的合成数据集和因果机器学习基准的实验中,DECI的竞争性表现。