# CATENets - Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation Using Neural Networks
[](https://github.com/AliciaCurth/CATENets/actions/workflows/test.yml)
[](https://catenets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/?badge=latest)
[](https://github.com/AliciaCurth/CATENets/blob/main/LICENSE)
Code Author: Alicia Curth (amc253@cam.ac.uk)
This repo contains Jax-based, sklearn-style implementations of Neural Network-based Conditional
Average Treatment Effect (CATE) Estimators, which were used in the AISTATS21 paper
['Nonparametric Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: From Theory to Learning
Algorithms']( https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10943) (Curth & vd Schaar, 2021a) as well as the follow up
NeurIPS21 paper ["On Inductive Biases for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03765) (Curth & vd
Schaar, 2021b) and the NeurIPS21 Datasets & Benchmarks track paper ["Really Doing Great at Estimating CATE? A Critical Look at ML Benchmarking Practices in Treatment Effect Estimation"](https://openreview.net/forum?id=FQLzQqGEAH) (Curth et al, 2021).
We implement the SNet-class we introduce in Curth & vd Schaar (2021a), as well as FlexTENet and
OffsetNet as discussed in Curth & vd Schaar (2021b), and re-implement a number of
NN-based algorithms from existing literature (Shalit et al (2017), Shi et al (2019), Hassanpour
& Greiner (2020)). We also provide Neural Network (NN)-based instantiations of a number of so-called
meta-learners for CATE estimation, including two-step pseudo-outcome regression estimators (the
DR-learner (Kennedy, 2020) and single-robust propensity-weighted (PW) and regression-adjusted (RA) learners), Nie & Wager (2017)'s R-learner and Kuenzel et al (2019)'s X-learner. The jax implementations in ``catenets.models.jax`` were used in all papers listed; additionally, pytorch versions of some models (``catenets.models.torch``) were contributed by [Bogdan Cebere](https://github.com/bcebere).
### Interface
The repo contains a package ``catenets``, which contains all general code used for modeling and evaluation, and a folder ``experiments``, in which the code for replicating experimental results is contained. All implemented learning algorithms in ``catenets`` (``SNet, FlexTENet, OffsetNet, TNet, SNet1 (TARNet), SNet2
(DragonNet), SNet3, DRNet, RANet, PWNet, RNet, XNet``) come with a sklearn-style wrapper, implementing a ``.fit(X, y, w)`` and a ``.predict(X)`` method, where predict returns CATE by default. All hyperparameters are documented in detail in the respective files in ``catenets.models`` folder.
Example usage:
```python
from catenets.models.jax import TNet, SNet
from catenets.experiment_utils.simulation_utils import simulate_treatment_setup
# simulate some data (here: unconfounded, 10 prognostic variables and 5 predictive variables)
X, y, w, p, cate = simulate_treatment_setup(n=2000, n_o=10, n_t=5, n_c=0)
# estimate CATE using TNet
t = TNet()
t.fit(X, y, w)
cate_pred_t = t.predict(X) # without potential outcomes
cate_pred_t, po0_pred_t, po1_pred_t = t.predict(X, return_po=True) # predict potential outcomes too
# estimate CATE using SNet
s = SNet(penalty_orthogonal=0.01)
s.fit(X, y, w)
cate_pred_s = s.predict(X)
```
All experiments in Curth & vd Schaar (2021a) can be replicated using this repository; the necessary
code is in ``experiments.experiments_AISTATS21``. To do so from shell, clone the repo, create a new
virtual environment and run
```shell
pip install -r requirements.txt #install requirements
python run_experiments_AISTATS.py
```
```shell
Options:
--experiment # defaults to 'simulation', 'ihdp' will run ihdp experiments
--setting # different simulation settings in synthetic experiments (can be 1-5)
--models # defaults to None which will train all models considered in paper,
# can be string of model name (e.g 'TNet'), 'plug' for all plugin models,
# 'pseudo' for all pseudo-outcome regression models
--file_name # base file name to write to, defaults to 'results'
--n_repeats # number of experiments to run for each configuration, defaults to 10 (should be set to 100 for IHDP)
```
Similarly, the experiments in Curth & vd Schaar (2021b) can be replicated using the code in
``experiments.experiments_inductivebias_NeurIPS21`` (or from shell using ```python
run_experiments_inductive_bias_NeurIPS.py```) and the experiments in Curth et al (2021) can be replicated using the code in ``experiments.experiments_benchmarks_NeurIPS21`` (the catenets experiments can also be run from shell using ``python run_experiments_benchmarks_NeurIPS``).
The code can also be installed as a python package (``catenets``). From a local copy of the repo, run ``python setup.py install``.
Note: jax is currently only supported on macOS and linux, but can be run from windows using WSL (the windows subsystem for linux).
### Citing
If you use this software please cite the corresponding paper(s):
```
@inproceedings{curth2021nonparametric,
title={Nonparametric Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: From Theory to Learning Algorithms},
author={Curth, Alicia and van der Schaar, Mihaela},
year={2021},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)},
organization={PMLR}
}
@article{curth2021inductive,
title={On Inductive Biases for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation},
author={Curth, Alicia and van der Schaar, Mihaela},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2021}
}
@article{curth2021really,
title={Really Doing Great at Estimating CATE? A Critical Look at ML Benchmarking Practices in Treatment Effect Estimation},
author={Curth, Alicia and Svensson, David and Weatherall, James and van der Schaar, Mihaela},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks},
year={2021}
}
```