mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Joint Treatment Effect Estimation from Incomplete Healthcare Data: Temporal Causal Normalizing Flows with LLM-driven Evolutionary MNAR Imputation

arXiv 2605.05125 ↗First posted 6 May 2026cs.LG cs.AIcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

Target trial emulation (TTE) enables causal questions to be studied with observational data when randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are infeasible. Yet treatment-effect methods often address causal estimation, missingness, and temporal structure separately, limiting their robustness in electronic health records (EHRs), where time-varying confounding and missing-not-at-random (MNAR) biomarkers can reach 50%--80%. We propose a two-stage pipeline for treatment effect estimation from incomplete longitudinal EHRs. First, CausalFlow-T, a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-constrained normalizing flow with long short-term memory (LSTM)-encoded patient history, performs exact invertible counterfactual inference, avoiding approximation errors from variational inference and separating confounding through explicit causal structure. Ablations on four synthetic and one semi-synthetic benchmark with known counterfactuals show that DAG constraints and exact inference address distinct failure modes: neither compensates for the other. Second, because CausalFlow-T requires completed inputs, we introduce an LLM-driven evolutionary imputer that proposes executable imputation operators rather than individual entries, and evaluate it with three large language model (LLM) backends, including two open-source models. Across 30%--80% MNAR missingness, this imputer achieves the best pooled rank over biomarker and causal metrics, leading in point-wise accuracy and temporal extrapolation while preserving average treatment effect (ATE) recovery as statistical baselines degrade. On Swiss primary-care EHRs from adults with type 2 diabetes initiating a GLP-1 receptor agonist or SGLT-2 inhibitor, the pipeline estimates a per-protocol weight-loss difference of -0.98 kg [95% CI -1.01, -0.96] favoring GLP-1 receptor agonists, consistent with randomized evidence and obtained from realistically incomplete real-world EHRs.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 May 2026.

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12 of 34 references.

References · 12

  1. 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 867
  2. 2017Causal Effect Inference with Deep Latent-Variable Modelscited by 410
  3. 2024Evolution of Heuristics: Towards Efficient Automatic Algorithm Design Using Large Language Modelcited by 268
  4. 2025ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolutioncited by 174
  5. 2020Estimating Counterfactual Treatment Outcomes over Time Through Adversarially Balanced Representationscited by 155
  6. 2022Causal Transformer for Estimating Counterfactual Outcomescited by 123
  7. 2020Causal Autoregressive Flowscited by 99
  8. 2018Graphical Models for Processing Missing Datacited by 58
  9. 2023Causal normalizing flows: from theory to practicecited by 51
  10. 2024LLM-Forest: Ensemble Learning of LLMs with Graph-Augmented Prompts for Data Imputationcited by 25
  11. 2023Modeling Causal Mechanisms with Diffusion Models for Interventional and Counterfactual Queriescited by 24
  12. 2026Large Language Models for Missing Data Imputation: Understanding Behavior, Hallucination Effects, and Control Mechanismscited by 2

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