An AI-powered Bayesian generative modeling approach for causal inference in observational studies

TL;DR

This paper introduces CausalBGM, an AI-powered Bayesian generative model that improves causal inference in observational studies with high-dimensional data by estimating individual treatment effects through latent confounders.

Contribution

It presents a novel Bayesian generative approach that captures complex variable dependencies and estimates individual treatment effects using latent features, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

CausalBGM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in high-dimensional settings.

The approach provides well-calibrated posterior intervals for treatment effects.

It effectively mitigates confounding effects in observational data.

Abstract

Causal inference in observational studies with high-dimensional covariates presents significant challenges. We introduce CausalBGM, an AI-powered Bayesian generative modeling approach that captures the causal relationship among covariates, treatment, and outcome. The core innovation is to estimate the individual treatment effect (ITE) by learning the individual-specific distribution of a low-dimensional latent feature set (e.g., latent confounders) that drives changes in both treatment and outcome. This individualized posterior representation yields estimates of the individual treatment effect (ITE) together with well-calibrated posterior intervals while mitigating confounding effect. CausalBGM is fitted through an iterative algorithm to update the model parameters and the latent features until convergence. This framework leverages the power of AI to capture complex dependencies among variables while adhering to the Bayesian principles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalBGM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in scenarios with high-dimensional covariates and large-scale datasets. By addressing key limitations of existing methods, CausalBGM emerges as a robust and promising framework for advancing causal inference in a wide range of modern applications. The code for CausalBGM is available at https://github.com/liuq-lab/bayesgm. The document for using CausalBGM is available at https://bayesgm.readthedocs.io.