# Causal Effect Estimation with Variational AutoEncoder and the Front Door Criterion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11969/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Quasi-Oracle Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04912/) (2017)
- [Learning Representations for Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03661/) (2016)
- [Generalized Random Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01271/) (2016)
- [Recursive Partitioning for Heterogeneous Causal Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.01132/) (2015)
- [Kernel Instrumental Variable Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00232/) (2019)
- [Deep Generalized Method of Moments for Instrumental Variable Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12495/) (2019)
- [Treatment effect estimation with disentangled latent factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10652/) (2020)
- [Valid Causal Inference with (Some) Invalid Instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11386/) (2020)
- [Auto IV: Counterfactual Prediction via Automatic Instrumental Variable Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05884/) (2021)
- [Ivy: Instrumental Variable Synthesis for Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05316/) (2020)
- [Causal Mediation Analysis with Hidden Confounders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11724/) (2021)
- [Finding and Listing Front-door Adjustment Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05816/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Disentangled Representation via Variational AutoEncoder for Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02310/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An essential problem in causal inference is estimating causal effects from observational data. The problem becomes more challenging with the presence of unobserved confounders. When there are unobserved confounders, the commonly used back-door adjustment is not applicable. Although the instrumental variable (IV) methods can deal with unobserved confounders, they all assume that the treatment directly affects the outcome, and there is no mediator between the treatment and the outcome. This paper aims to use the front-door criterion to address the challenging problem with the presence of unobserved confounders and mediators. In practice, it is often difficult to identify the set of variables used for front-door adjustment from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models in representation learning, we propose FDVAE to learn the representation of a Front-Door adjustment set with a Variational AutoEncoder, instead of trying to search for a set of variables for front-door adjustment. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of FDVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of FDVAE is not sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounders and is feasible in the case of dimensionality mismatch between learned representations and the ground truth. We further apply the method to three real-world datasets to demonstrate its potential applications.