Counterfactually-Equivalent Structural Causal Modelling Using Causal Graphical Normalizing Flows
2024 (English)In: 12th International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models / [ed] Johan Kwisthout, Silja Renooij, JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH , 2024, Vol. 246, p. 164-181Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed) [Artistic work]
Abstract [en]
Recent research has highlighted the properties that deep-learning inspired causal models such as Deep-Structural Causal Model (Deep-SCM), Causal Autoregressive Flow (CAREFL) and Causal-Graphical Normalizing Flow (c-GNF) should exhibit to guarantee observational and interventional distribution equivalence with the true underlying causal data generating process (DGP), making them suitable for estimating average causal effect (ACE) or conditional ACE (CACE). However, for accurate individual-level causal effect (ICE) estimation and personalized treatment/public-policy formulation, it is crucial to ensure counterfactual equivalence between these models and the DGP. Firstly, we demonstrate that c-GNFs provide counterfactual equivalence under certain monotonicity assumption of the DGP, enabling precise ICE estimation and personalized treatment/public-policy analysis. Secondly, using this counterfactual equivalence of c-GNFs, we perform a counterfactual analysis and personalized public-policy analysis of the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs on child poverty using large-scale real-world observational data. Our results indicate a reduction in child poverty due to the IMF program at different personalization granularities. Our study also performs sensitivity analyses to assess potential threats to the unconfoundedness assumption and estimates ACE bounds and the E-value. This illustrates the potential of c-GNFs for causal and counterfactual inference in fields such as social, natural, and medical sciences.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH , 2024. Vol. 246, p. 164-181
Series
Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, ISSN 2640-3498
Keywords [en]
Counterfactuals, Normalizing Flows, Structural Causal Model, IMF, Child Poverty
National Category
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-207827ISI: 001347210900010OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-207827DiVA, id: diva2:1900881
Conference
12th International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models, Nijmegen, Netherlands, September 11 - 13, 2024
2024-09-252024-09-252024-12-10Bibliographically approved