# CRTRE: Causal Rule Generation with Target Trial Emulation Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06338 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06338/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00033/) (2018)
- [Model-Agnostic Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05386/) (2016)
- [Deep Stable Learning for Out-Of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07876/) (2021)
- [MIMIC-Extract: A Data Extraction, Preprocessing, and Representation Pipeline for MIMIC-III](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08322/) (2019)
- [Theoretical Impediments to Machine Learning With Seven Sparks from the Causal Revolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04016/) (2018)
- [Stable Prediction with Model Misspecification and Agnostic Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11713/) (2020)
- [DLIME: A Deterministic Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations Approach for Computer-Aided Diagnosis Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10263/) (2019)
- [Stable Prediction across Unknown Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06270/) (2018)
- [Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01515/) (2022)
- [A Label Attention Model for ICD Coding from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06351/) (2020)
- [Launching into clinical space with medspaCy: a new clinical text processing toolkit in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07799/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Injected Prompt Based Fine-tuning for Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03304/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01874/) (2024)
- [Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding as Autoregressive Generation with Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13813/) (2022)
- [Assessing the Causal Impact of COVID-19 Related Policies on Outbreak Dynamics: A Case Study in the US](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01315/) (2021)
- [Predicting Parkinson's Disease with Multimodal Irregularly Collected Longitudinal Smartphone Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11999/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Causal inference and model interpretability are gaining increasing attention, particularly in the biomedical domain. Despite recent advance, decorrelating features in nonlinear environments with human-interpretable representations remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel method called causal rule generation with target trial emulation framework (CRTRE), which applies randomize trial design principles to estimate the causal effect of association rules. We then incorporate such association rules for the downstream applications such as prediction of disease onsets. Extensive experiments on six healthcare datasets, including synthetic data, real-world disease collections, and MIMIC-III/IV, demonstrate the model's superior performance. Specifically, our method achieved a β error of 0.907, outperforming DWR (1.024) and SVM (1.141). On real-world datasets, our model achieved accuracies of 0.789, 0.920, and 0.300 for Esophageal Cancer, Heart Disease, and Cauda Equina Syndrome prediction task, respectively, consistently surpassing baseline models. On the ICD code prediction tasks, it achieved AUC Macro scores of 92.8 on MIMIC-III and 96.7 on MIMIC-IV, outperforming the state-of-the-art models KEPT and MSMN. Expert evaluations further validate the model's effectiveness, causality, and interpretability.