The paper investigates how learned multimodal representations of high‑dimensional health data can fail to preserve causal information, even when trained to reconstruct the data. It establishes conditions under which a representation is sufficient for causal identification, shows that interventional mediation requires stricter preservation than counterfactual comparison, and proves that reconstruction‑based objectives cannot certify sufficiency. The authors decompose the error of cross‑fitted doubly robust estimators into a first‑order representation bias and a second‑order nuisance‑estimation remainder, demonstrating that coverage can deteriorate with larger samples if the representation is insufficient. They propose a practical workflow that combines modality‑specific variational autoencoders, cross‑fitted doubly robust estimation, locked phenotypes, selective pathway analysis, portable representations, and diagnostics for representation insufficiency, exposure leakage, and sensitivity, and validate it in simulations where a rare confounder’s omission leads to severely under‑covered indirect‑effect intervals.
arXiv:2604. 23904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference.
arXiv:2601. 14590v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) provide human-centric interpretability by identifying the minimal, actionable changes required to alter a machine learning model's prediction.
arXiv:2606. 05797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal treatment decisions require predicting potential outcomes under future treatment sequences in the presence of time-varying confounding, heterogeneous patient dynamics, and limited domain-specific data.
ACTIVA is a transformer‑based conditional variational autoencoder designed to estimate full interventional distributions from observational data without requiring interventional data, a causal graph, or per‑task fitting. It learns a conditional latent prior that amortizes causal knowledge across diverse training tasks, enabling a single forward pass to handle new causal models drawn from the training distribution. Empirical results on synthetic and biologically realistic gene‑expression simulations show that ACTIVA outperforms correlational baselines, reduces spurious non‑descendant effects, and matches strong amortized baselines, while also validating its theoretical mixture‑of‑distributions property on observationally equivalent models.
The paper introduces Proximal Survival Bridge learning (PSB), a flexible doubly robust framework for estimating causal effects on right‑censored time‑to‑event outcomes under unmeasured confounding. PSB builds on proximal causal inference to produce outcome‑bridge, treatment‑bridge, and doubly robust estimators, and offers two flexible bridge learners: PSB‑K, a kernel estimator with low‑rank time decomposition, and PSB‑N, a neural estimator trained with a projected maximum‑moment‑restriction loss. Experiments on a standard SEM benchmark, a proximal semi‑synthetic ACTG study, and the real‑world Framingham study show PSB‑K excels on SEM and ACTG data, while PSB‑N provides greater stability on Framingham, with additional analyses demonstrating robustness to proxy quality and censoring levels.
arXiv:2608. 08288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from longitudinal observational data is central to clinical decision support.
arXiv:2507. 20993v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study how to learn treatment policies from multimodal electronic health records (EHRs) that consist of tabular data and clinical text.
arXiv:2604. 16763v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal inference from electronic health records (EHR) is fundamentally limited by unmeasured confounding: critical clinical states such as frailty, goals of care, and mental status are documented in free-text notes but absent from structured data.
arXiv:2606. 21806v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep generative models reproduce the observational distribution of their training data, inheriting any spurious associations it contains.
The paper introduces new one‑step and targeted minimum loss‑based estimators for the average treatment effect and the average treatment effect on the treated under the front‑door criterion. These estimators use multiple parameterizations of the observed data distribution, can avoid modeling the mediator density, and are compatible with flexible machine‑learning nuisance estimation. The authors derive conditions for root‑n consistency, asymptotic linearity, and develop doubly robust tests for identification assumptions, demonstrating improved efficiency and favorable performance in simulations and real‑world applications in education and emergency medicine.
arXiv:2609.14124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical image analysis is often hindered by biased datasets, which can lead to biased models and limited clinical applicability. A promising strategy...
arXiv:2609.06294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) enables efficient targeting of interventions, but many applications have limited experimental s...