Mihaela van Der Schaar
Wed 26 Sep 2018, 16:00 - 17:00
IF 4.31/4.33

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Gareth Beedham (gbeedham)

Causal Inference for Treatment Effects: A Theory and Associated Learning Algorithms

We investigate the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on individual subjects from observational data; this is a central problem in various application domains, including healthcare, social sciences, and online advertising. We first develop a theoretical foundation of causal inference for individualized treatment effects based on information theory. Next, we use this theory, to construct an information-optimal Bayesian causal inference algorithm.  This algorithm embeds the potential outcomes in a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space and uses a multi-task Gaussian process prior over that space to infer the individualized causal effects. We show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art causal inference models. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the impact of this work on precision medicine and clinical trials.