Estimating causal effects with the neural autoregressive density estimator

Journal of Causal Inference 9 (1):211-228 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The estimation of causal effects is fundamental in situations where the underlying system will be subject to active interventions. Part of building a causal inference engine is defining how variables relate to each other, that is, defining the functional relationship between variables entailed by the graph conditional dependencies. In this article, we deviate from the common assumption of linear relationships in causal models by making use of neural autoregressive density estimators and use them to estimate causal effects within Pearl’s do-calculus framework. Using synthetic data, we show that the approach can retrieve causal effects from non-linear systems without explicitly modeling the interactions between the variables and include confidence bands using the non-parametric bootstrap. We also explore scenarios that deviate from the ideal causal effect estimation setting such as poor data support or unobserved confounders.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Averaging causal estimators in high dimensions.Matthew Cefalu & Joseph Antonelli - 2020 - Journal of Causal Inference 8 (1):92-107.
Causal Dependence and Multiplicity.David H. Sanford - 1985 - Philosophy 60 (232):215-230.
Two solutions to the neural discernment problem.Bradford Saad - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (10):2837-2850.
Aggregating Causal Judgments.Richard Bradley, Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (4):491-515.
Causal Theories of Action.Michael J. Costa - 1987 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (4):831 - 854.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-09-18

Downloads
3 (#1,519,925)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Francisco Pereira
Universidad Alberto Hurtado

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):201-202.

Add more references