Review of Deep Learning Methods for Individual Treatment Effect
Estimation with Automatic Hyperparameter Optimization
Abstract
Abstract—Estimation of individual treatment effect (ITE) for
different types of treatment is a common challenge in therapy
assessments, clinical trials and diagnosis. Deep learning methods,
namely representation based, adversarial, and variational, have shown
promising potential in ITE estimation. However, it was unclear whether
the hyperparameters of the originally proposed methods were well
optimized for different benchmark datasets. To solve these problems, we
created a public code library containing representation-based,
adversarial, and variational methods written in TensorFlow. In order to
have a broader collection of ITE estimation methods, we have also
included neural network based meta-learners. The code library is made
accessible for reproducibility and facilitating future works in the
field of causal inference. Our results demonstrate that performance of
most methods can be improved using automatic hyperparameter
optimization. Additionally, we review the methods and compare the
performance of the optimized models from our library on publicly
available datasets. The potential of hyperparameter optimization may
encourage researchers to focus on this aspect when creating new methods
for inferring individual treatment effect.