VACA: Designing Variational Graph Autoencoders for Causal Queries
Pablo Sanchez-Martin, Miriam Rateike, Isabel Valera
[AAAI-22] Main Track
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce VACA, a novel class of variational graph autoencoders for causal inference in the absence of hidden confounders, when only observational data and the causal graph are available. Without making any parametric assumptions, VACA mimics the necessary properties of a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to provide a flexible and practical framework for approximating interventions (do-operator) and abduction-action-prediction steps. As a result, and as shown by our empirical results, VACA accurately approximates the interventional and counterfactual distributions on diverse SCMs. Finally, we apply VACA to evaluate counterfactual fairness in fair classification problems, as well as to learn fair classifiers without compromising performance.
Introduction Video
Sessions where this paper appears
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Poster Session 1
Blue 3
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Poster Session 12
Blue 3
