Causal EpiNets: Precision-corrected Bounds on Individual Treatment Effects using Epistemic Neural Networks
About
Individual treatment effects are not point-identified from data. The Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS) circumvents this limitation by characterizing individual-level causality through intersection bounds derived from combined experimental and observational data. In finite samples, however, standard plug-in estimators systematically fail: they violate structural probability constraints and suffer from extremum bias induced by max-min operators, yielding spuriously narrow intervals. We propose a neural framework for finite-sample PNS estimation that resolves both pathologies. We introduce an anchored neural architecture that guarantees structural constraint satisfaction by construction. To correct extremum bias, we employ precision-corrected intersection-bound inference, leveraging Epistemic Neural Networks for scalable, high-dimensional uncertainty quantification. Empirical evaluations confirm that this approach maintains nominal coverage and exact constraint validity in high-dimensional regimes where standard estimators systematically undercover.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Computational Efficiency | Synthetic DGP n_train=25k | Inference Latency (s)612 | 9 | |
| Computational Efficiency | Synthetic DGP | Inference Latency (ms)612 | 6 | |
| PNS estimation | Low-dimensional synthetic nobs = 100k, nexp = 50k | Validity100 | 6 | |
| PNS estimation | High-dimensional ACIC | Valid Percentage100 | 3 |