# Continual Causal Effect Estimation: Challenges and Opportunities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01026/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04342/) (2015)
- [Meta-learners for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03461/) (2017)
- [Causal Effect Inference with Deep Latent-Variable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08821/) (2017)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [Quasi-Oracle Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04912/) (2017)
- [Recursive Partitioning for Heterogeneous Causal Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.01132/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02770/) (2020)
- [Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00725/) (2021)
- [Class-incremental Learning via Deep Model Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07864/) (2019)
- [Graph Infomax Adversarial Learning for Treatment Effect Estimation with Networked Observational Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02881/) (2021)
- [Learning Causal Effects on Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04049/) (2022)
- [Matching in Selective and Balanced Representation Space for Treatment Effects Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06828/) (2020)
- [Learning Infomax and Domain-Independent Representations for Causal Effect Inference with Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10885/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Causal Analysis into Diversified and Logical Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09482/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A further understanding of cause and effect within observational data is critical across many domains, such as economics, health care, public policy, web mining, online advertising, and marketing campaigns. Although significant advances have been made to overcome the challenges in causal effect estimation with observational data, such as missing counterfactual outcomes and selection bias between treatment and control groups, the existing methods mainly focus on source-specific and stationary observational data. Such learning strategies assume that all observational data are already available during the training phase and from only one source. This practical concern of accessibility is ubiquitous in various academic and industrial applications. That's what it boiled down to: in the era of big data, we face new challenges in causal inference with observational data, i.e., the extensibility for incrementally available observational data, the adaptability for extra domain adaptation problem except for the imbalance between treatment and control groups, and the accessibility for an enormous amount of data. In this position paper, we formally define the problem of continual treatment effect estimation, describe its research challenges, and then present possible solutions to this problem. Moreover, we will discuss future research directions on this topic.