# Disentangled Representation via Variational AutoEncoder for Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02310 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02310/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00670/) (2016)
- [Learning Representations for Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03661/) (2016)
- [Adapting Neural Networks for the Estimation of Treatment Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02120/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02770/) (2020)
- [Causal Machine Learning: A Survey and Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15475/) (2022)
- [Learning Counterfactual Representations for Estimating Individual Dose-Response Curves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00981/) (2019)
- [Estimating the Effects of Continuous-valued Interventions using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12326/) (2020)
- [Treatment effect estimation with disentangled latent factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10652/) (2020)
- [VCNet and Functional Targeted Regularization For Learning Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07861/) (2021)
- [Exploring Transformer Backbones for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01336/) (2022)
- [Learning Disentangled Representations for Counterfactual Regression via Mutual Information Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01022/) (2022)
- [Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation Using Gradient Interpolation and Kernel Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15447/) (2024)
- [Causal Effect Estimation with Variational AutoEncoder and the Front Door Criterion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11969/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continuous treatment effect estimation holds significant practical importance across various decision-making and assessment domains, such as healthcare and the military. However, current methods for estimating dose-response curves hinge on balancing the entire representation by treating all covariates as confounding variables. Although various approaches disentangle covariates into different factors for treatment effect estimation, they are confined to binary treatment settings. Moreover, observational data are often tainted with non-causal noise information that is imperceptible to the human. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel Dose-Response curve estimator via Variational AutoEncoder (DRVAE) disentangled covariates representation. Our model is dedicated to disentangling covariates into instrumental factors, confounding factors, adjustment factors, and external noise factors, thereby facilitating the estimation of treatment effects under continuous treatment settings by balancing the disentangled confounding factors. Extensive results on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.