Estimating causal effects from observational data informs us about which factors are important in an autonomous system, and enables us to take better decisions. This is important because it has applications in selecting a treatment in medical systems or making better strategies in industries or making better policies for our government or even the society. Unavailability of complete data, coupled with high cardinality of data, makes this estimation task computationally intractable. Recently, a regression-based weighted estimator has been introduced that is capable of producing solution using bounded samples of a given problem. However, as the data dimension increases, the solution produced by the regression-based method degrades. Against this background, we introduce a neural network based estimator that improves the solution quality in case of non-linear and finitude of samples. Finally, our empirical evaluation illustrates a significant improvement of solution quality, up to around $55\%$, compared to the state-of-the-art estimators.
翻译:观察数据的估计因果关系告诉我们,在自主系统中哪些因素很重要,使我们能够作出更好的决定。这很重要,因为它在选择医疗系统中的治疗方法、在行业中制定更好的战略或为政府甚至社会制定更好的政策方面具有应用性。由于缺乏完整的数据,加上数据高度重要,这一估算任务难以计算。最近,引入了一个基于回归的加权估算器,它能够利用某一问题的捆绑样本产生解决方案。然而,随着数据维度的增加,基于回归法产生的解决方案会退化。在此背景下,我们引入了一个基于神经网络的估测器,在样品非线性、细度的情况下提高解决方案的质量。最后,我们的经验评估表明,与最先进的估测器相比,解决方案的质量有显著改善,达到约55,000美元。