论文标题
在运行时混淆下的反事实预测
Counterfactual Predictions under Runtime Confounding
论文作者
论文摘要
算法通常用于预测特定决策或干预措施下的结果,例如预测罪犯在最少的监督下是否会在假释中取得成功。通常,要从有关历史决策和相应结果的观察数据中学习此类反事实预测模型,必须衡量所有共同影响结果和决定的因素。在决策支持应用程序的激励下,我们研究了在历史数据中捕获所有相关因素的环境中的反事实预测任务,但是在预测模型中使用某些此类因素是不受欢迎的或不允许的。我们将此设置称为运行时混杂。我们为在这种情况下学习反事实预测模型的双重努力程序。我们的理论分析和实验结果表明,我们的方法通常优于竞争方法。我们还提出了一个验证程序,用于评估反事实预测方法的性能。
Algorithms are commonly used to predict outcomes under a particular decision or intervention, such as predicting whether an offender will succeed on parole if placed under minimal supervision. Generally, to learn such counterfactual prediction models from observational data on historical decisions and corresponding outcomes, one must measure all factors that jointly affect the outcomes and the decision taken. Motivated by decision support applications, we study the counterfactual prediction task in the setting where all relevant factors are captured in the historical data, but it is either undesirable or impermissible to use some such factors in the prediction model. We refer to this setting as runtime confounding. We propose a doubly-robust procedure for learning counterfactual prediction models in this setting. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results suggest that our method often outperforms competing approaches. We also present a validation procedure for evaluating the performance of counterfactual prediction methods.