Causal Modeling of Policy Interventions From Treatment-Outcome Sequences

Caglar Hizli, ST John, Anne Juuti, Tuure Saarinen, Kirsi Pietiläinen, Pekka Marttinen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

A treatment policy defines when and what treatments are applied to affect some outcome of interest. Data-driven decision-making requires the ability to predict what happens if a policy is changed. Existing methods that predict how the outcome evolves under different scenarios assume that the tentative sequences of future treatments are fixed in advance, while in practice the treatments are determined stochastically by a policy and may depend, for example, on the efficiency of previous treatments. Therefore, the current methods are not applicable if the treatment policy is unknown or a counterfactual analysis is needed. To handle these limitations, we model the treatments and outcomes jointly in continuous time, by combining Gaussian processes and point processes. Our model enables the estimation of a treatment policy from observational sequences of treatments and outcomes, and it can predict the interventional and counterfactual progression of the outcome after an intervention on the treatment policy (in contrast with the causal effect of a single treatment). We show with real-world and semi-synthetic data on blood glucose progression that our method can answer causal queries more accurately than existing alternatives.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning
EditorsAndread Krause, Emma Brunskill, Kyunghyun Cho, Barbara Engelhardt, Sivan Sabato, Jonathan Scarlett
PublisherJMLR
Pages13050-13084
Number of pages35
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2023
MoE publication typeA4 Conference publication
EventInternational Conference on Machine Learning - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 23 Jul 202329 Jul 2023
Conference number: 40

Publication series

NameProceedings of Machine Learning Research
PublisherPMLR
Volume202
ISSN (Electronic)2640-3498

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Machine Learning
Abbreviated titleICML
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period23/07/202329/07/2023

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