论文标题
因果分类的一般框架
A general framework for causal classification
论文作者
论文摘要
在许多应用中,有必要预测干预对数据中不同个体的影响。例如,哪些客户可以通过产品推广说服?哪些患者应接受某种类型的治疗治疗?这些是典型的因果问题,涉及干预措施的影响或结果的变化。这些问题不能用传统的分类方法来回答,因为它们仅使用关联来预测结果。对于个性化的营销,这些问题通常通过隆重建模来回答。隆升建模的目的是估计因果效应,但其文献没有讨论隆起何时代表因果效应。因果异质性建模可以解决该问题,但是数据中的假设在数据中是无法检验的。因此,从业者使用方法时需要在其应用中进行准则。在本文中,我们将因果分类用于一组个性化的决策问题,并将其与分类区分开。我们讨论可以通过隆起(和因果异质性)建模方法解决因果分类的条件。我们还通过使用现成的监督方法来灵活实施,为因果分类提供了一个一般框架。实验显示了有关因果分类和提升(因果异质性)建模的框架工作的两个实例,并且与其他隆福(因果异质性)建模方法具有竞争力。
In many applications, there is a need to predict the effect of an intervention on different individuals from data. For example, which customers are persuadable by a product promotion? which patients should be treated with a certain type of treatment? These are typical causal questions involving the effect or the change in outcomes made by an intervention. The questions cannot be answered with traditional classification methods as they only use associations to predict outcomes. For personalised marketing, these questions are often answered with uplift modelling. The objective of uplift modelling is to estimate causal effect, but its literature does not discuss when the uplift represents causal effect. Causal heterogeneity modelling can solve the problem, but its assumption of unconfoundedness is untestable in data. So practitioners need guidelines in their applications when using the methods. In this paper, we use causal classification for a set of personalised decision making problems, and differentiate it from classification. We discuss the conditions when causal classification can be resolved by uplift (and causal heterogeneity) modelling methods. We also propose a general framework for causal classification, by using off-the-shelf supervised methods for flexible implementations. Experiments have shown two instantiations of the framework work for causal classification and for uplift (causal heterogeneity) modelling, and are competitive with the other uplift (causal heterogeneity) modelling methods.