Quantized Factor Identifiable Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder

초록

Causal inference involves determining how interventions affect outcomes and explaining the underlying mechanisms, and it holds critical importance across various fields. A key assumption in causal inference is that the measured covariates form a sufficient adjustment set. However, this assumption often fails due to unobserved confounders, as confounding mechanisms are rarely fully captured by measured covariates alone. Recent research has attempted to address this challenge using variational autoencoders (VAEs), but these approaches face practical limitations, including unidentifiability and bias toward proxy variables. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel method that incorporates quantized factor identifiability into VAEs for causal effect estimation. This integration mitigates unidentifiability and reduces the dominance of proxy variables, thereby enhancing consistency and accuracy in causal inference. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method, establishing a new benchmark in deep causal modeling.

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