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Poster

A Generative Approach for Treatment Effect Estimation under Collider Bias: From an Out-of-Distribution Perspective

Baohong Li · Haoxuan Li · Anpeng Wu · Minqin Zhu · shiyuan Peng · Qingyu Cao · Kun Kuang


Abstract: Resulting from non-random sample selection caused by both the treatment and outcome, collider bias poses a unique challenge to treatment effect estimation using observational data whose distribution differs from that of the target population. In this paper, we rethink collider bias from an Out-of-Distribution (OOD) perspective, considering that the entire data space of the target population consists of two different environments: The observational data selected from the target population belongs to an environmental labeled with $S=1$ and the missing unselected data belongs to another environmental labeled with $S=0$. Based on this OOD formulation, we utilize small-scale representative data from the entire data space with no environmental labels and propose a novel method, i.e., Coupled Counterfactual Generative Adversarial Model (C$^2$GAM), to simultaneously generate the missing $S=0$ samples in observational data and the missing $S$ labels in the small-scale representative data. With the help of C$^2$GAM, collider bias can be addressed by combining the generated $S=0$ samples and the observational data to estimate treatment effects. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that plugging C$^2$GAM into existing treatment effect estimators achieves significant performance improvements.

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