Deep End-to-end Causal Inference
About
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.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Noise Prediction | AVICI (out-of-distribution) | LIN (RMSE)0.07 | 32 | |
| Sample Generation | AVICI RFF (Out-of-distribution) | RMSE0.27 | 16 | |
| Counterfactual Generation | AVICI (test) | LIN RMSE (IN)0.02 | 16 | |
| Sample Generation | AVICI RFF (In-distribution) | RMSE0.33 | 16 | |
| Interventional Generation | AVICI In-distribution | LIN RMSE0.14 | 16 | |
| Noise Prediction | AVICI In-distribution | LIN RMSE0.08 | 16 | |
| Sample Generation | AVICI LIN (In-distribution) | RMSE0.14 | 16 | |
| Sample Generation | AVICI LIN (Out-of-distribution) | RMSE0.13 | 16 | |
| Structure learning | magic-irri n=100 | SHD102 | 11 | |
| Structure learning | ecoli70 n=100 | SHD70.95 | 11 |