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Continuous-Time Modeling of Counterfactual Outcomes Using Neural Controlled Differential Equations
Nabeel Seedat · Fergus Imrie · Alexis Bellot · Zhaozhi Qian · Mihaela van der Schaar

Thu Jul 21 10:40 AM -- 10:45 AM (PDT) @ Hall G
in Applications »

Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time has the potential to unlock personalized healthcare by assisting decision-makers to answer "what-if" questions. Existing causal inference approaches typically consider regular, discrete-time intervals between observations and treatment decisions and hence are unable to naturally model irregularly sampled data, which is the common setting in practice. To handle arbitrary observation patterns, we interpret the data as samples from an underlying continuous-time process and propose to model its latent trajectory explicitly using the mathematics of controlled differential equations. This leads to a new approach, the Treatment Effect Neural Controlled Differential Equation (TE-CDE), that allows the potential outcomes to be evaluated at any time point. In addition, adversarial training is used to adjust for time-dependent confounding which is critical in longitudinal settings and is an added challenge not encountered in conventional time series. To assess solutions to this problem, we propose a controllable simulation environment based on a model of tumor growth for a range of scenarios with irregular sampling reflective of a variety of clinical scenarios. TE-CDE consistently outperforms existing approaches in all scenarios with irregular sampling.

Keywords: APP: Health

Author Information

Nabeel Seedat (University of Cambridge)
Fergus Imrie (University of California, Los Angeles)
Alexis Bellot (University of Cambridge)
Zhaozhi Qian (University of Cambridge)
Mihaela van der Schaar (University of Cambridge and UCLA)
Mihaela van der Schaar

Professor van der Schaar is John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, a Turing Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London, and Chancellor's Professor at UCLA. She was elected IEEE Fellow in 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018), an NSF Career Award (2004), 3 IBM Faculty Awards, the IBM Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award, the Philips Make a Difference Award and several best paper awards, including the IEEE Darlington Award. She holds 35 granted USA patents. In 2019, she was identified by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts as the female researcher based in the UK with the most publications in the field of AI. She was also elected as a 2019 "Star in Computer Networking and Communications". Her current research focus is on machine learning, AI and operations research for healthcare and medicine. For more details, see her website: http://www.vanderschaar-lab.com/

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