ACE: Adaptively Similarity-Preserved Representation Learning for Individual Treatment Effect Estimation

Abstract

Treatment effect estimation refers to the estimation of causal effects, which benefits decision-making process across various domains, but it is a challenging problem in real practice. The estimation of causal effects from observational data at the individual level faces two major challenges, i.e., treatment selection bias and missing counterfactuals. Existing methods tackle the selection bias problem by learning a balanced representation and infer the missing counterfactuals based on the learned representation. However, most existing methods learn the representation in a global manner and ignore the local similarity information, which is essential for an accurate estimation of causal effects. Motivated by the above observations, we propose a novel representation learning method, which adaptively extracts fine-grained similarity information from the original feature space and minimizes the distance between different treatment groups as well as the similarity loss during the representation learning procedure. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance in causal effect estimation among all the compared methods and is robust to the treatment selection bias.