Counterfactual Density Estimation Using Kernel Stein Discrepancies

Abstract

Causal effects are usually studied in terms of the means of counterfactual distributions, which may be insufficient in many scenarios. Given a class of densities known up to normalizing constants, we propose to model counterfactual distributions by minimizing kernel Stein discrepancies in a doubly robust manner. This enables the estimation of counterfactuals over large classes of distributions while exploiting the desired double robustness. We present a theoretical analysis of the proposed estimator, providing sufficient conditions for consistency and asymptotic normality, as well as an examination of its empirical performance.

Cite

Text

Martinez-Taboada and Kennedy. "Counterfactual Density Estimation Using Kernel Stein Discrepancies." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024.

Markdown

[Martinez-Taboada and Kennedy. "Counterfactual Density Estimation Using Kernel Stein Discrepancies." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024.](https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2024/martineztaboada2024iclr-counterfactual/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{martineztaboada2024iclr-counterfactual,
  title     = {{Counterfactual Density Estimation Using Kernel Stein Discrepancies}},
  author    = {Martinez-Taboada, Diego and Kennedy, Edward},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year      = {2024},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2024/martineztaboada2024iclr-counterfactual/}
}