Sources of Gain: Decomposing Performance in Conditional Average Dose Response Estimation
cs.LG
Submitted: 2024-06-12
Updated: 2024-06-12
Comments: 25 pages, 9 figures
Journal ref: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2026)
Code: https://github.com/ioanabica/SCIGAN
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Estimating conditional average dose responses (CADR) is an important but challenging problem.
Terminology
Abstract
Estimating conditional average dose responses (CADR) is an important but challenging problem. Estimators must correctly model the potentially complex relationships between covariates, interventions, doses, and outcomes. In recent years, the machine learning community has shown great interest in developing tailored CADR estimators that target specific challenges. Their performance is typically evaluated against other methods on (semi-) synthetic benchmark datasets. Our paper analyses this practice and shows that using popular benchmark datasets without further analysis is insufficient to judge model performance. Established benchmarks entail multiple challenges, whose impacts must be disentangled. Therefore, we propose a novel decomposition scheme that allows the evaluation of the impact of five distinct components contributing to CADR estimator performance. We apply this scheme to eight popular CADR estimators on four widely-used benchmark datasets, running nearly 1,500 individual experiments. Our results reveal that most established benchmarks are challenging for reasons different from their creators' claims. Notably, confounding, the key challenge tackled by most estimators, is not an issue in any of the considered datasets. We discuss the major implications of our findings and present directions for future research.
Sources
- Estimating the Effects of Continuous-valued Interventions using Generative Adversarial Networks
- Entropy Balancing for Continuous Treatments
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