Conditional Generative Models are Sufficient to Sample from Any Causal Effect Estimand

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using conditional generative models, like diffusion models, to sample from any causal effect distribution in high-dimensional data, overcoming previous limitations with unobserved confounders.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel recursive algorithm that leverages conditional generative models to sample from identifiable interventional distributions in complex causal graphs.

Findings

Successfully sampled from P(y|do(x)) in high-dimensional image data.

Enabled causal analysis of spurious correlations in CelebA.

Generated interventional samples from MIMIC-CXR dataset.

Abstract

Causal inference from observational data plays critical role in many applications in trustworthy machine learning. While sound and complete algorithms exist to compute causal effects, many of them assume access to conditional likelihoods, which is difficult to estimate for high-dimensional (particularly image) data. Researchers have alleviated this issue by simulating causal relations with neural models. However, when we have high-dimensional variables in the causal graph along with some unobserved confounders, no existing work can effectively sample from the un/conditional interventional distributions. In this work, we show how to sample from any identifiable interventional distribution given an arbitrary causal graph through a sequence of push-forward computations of conditional generative models, such as diffusion models. Our proposed algorithm follows the recursive steps of the existing likelihood-based identification algorithms to train a set of feed-forward models, and connect them in a specific way to sample from the desired distribution. We conduct experiments on a Colored MNIST dataset having both the treatment ($X$) and the target variables ($Y$) as images and sample from $P(y|do(x))$. Our algorithm also enables us to conduct a causal analysis to evaluate spurious correlations among input features of generative models pre-trained on the CelebA dataset. Finally, we generate high-dimensional interventional samples from the MIMIC-CXR dataset involving text and image variables.