论文标题
多个领域因果网络
Multiple Domain Causal Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
观察性研究被认为是随机试验的经济替代方法,通常以其代替来调查和确定治疗功效。由于缺乏样本量,观察性研究通常结合了来自多个来源或不同地点/中心的数据。尽管样本量增加了,但多中心数据的幼稚组合可能会导致中心特异性方案引起的不一致性,以产生对特定中心不同的治疗的同类或反应。这些问题在其他各种情况下出现,包括捕获与个人独特的生物学特征有关的治疗效果。估计异质治疗效果的现有方法尚未充分解决多中心环境,而是将其视为获得足够样本量的手段。此外,先前估计治疗效果的方法并不能直接推广到多中心设计,尤其是在需要为新的,未观察到的中心的患者提供治疗见解时。为了解决这些缺点,我们提出了多个领域因果网络(MDCN),这种方法同时加强了相似中心之间的信息共享,同时通过学习新功能嵌入来解决治疗分配中的选择偏见。在经验评估中,与仅根据治疗失衡或一般中心差异进行调整的基准相比,在估计新中心的异质治疗效果时,MDCN始终更准确。最后,我们通过提供理论分析来证明MDCN改善了新的,未观察到的目标中心的概括。
Observational studies are regarded as economic alternatives to randomized trials, often used in their stead to investigate and determine treatment efficacy. Due to lack of sample size, observational studies commonly combine data from multiple sources or different sites/centers. Despite the benefits of an increased sample size, a naive combination of multicenter data may result in incongruities stemming from center-specific protocols for generating cohorts or reactions towards treatments distinct to a given center, among other things. These issues arise in a variety of other contexts, including capturing a treatment effect related to an individual's unique biological characteristics. Existing methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects have not adequately addressed the multicenter context, but rather treat it simply as a means to obtain sufficient sample size. Additionally, previous approaches to estimating treatment effects do not straightforwardly generalize to the multicenter design, especially when required to provide treatment insights for patients from a new, unobserved center. To address these shortcomings, we propose Multiple Domain Causal Networks (MDCN), an approach that simultaneously strengthens the information sharing between similar centers while addressing the selection bias in treatment assignment through learning of a new feature embedding. In empirical evaluations, MDCN is consistently more accurate when estimating the heterogeneous treatment effect in new centers compared to benchmarks that adjust solely based on treatment imbalance or general center differences. Finally, we justify our approach by providing theoretical analyses that demonstrate that MDCN improves on the generalization bound of the new, unobserved target center.