Measuring Variable Importance in Individual Treatment Effect Estimation with High Dimensional Data

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13002v1
• Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 11:44:07 GMT
• Title: Measuring Variable Importance in Individual Treatment Effect Estimation with High Dimensional Data
• Authors: Joseph Paillard, Vitaliy Kolodyazhniy, Bertrand Thirion, Denis A. Engemann,
• Abstract summary: Causal machine learning (ML) promises to provide powerful tools for estimating individual treatment effects. ML methods still face the significant challenge of interpretability, which is crucial for medical applications. We propose a new algorithm based on the Conditional Permutation Importance (CPI) method for statistically rigorous variable importance assessment.
• Score: 35.104681814241104
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Causal machine learning (ML) promises to provide powerful tools for estimating individual treatment effects. Although causal ML methods are now well established, they still face the significant challenge of interpretability, which is crucial for medical applications. In this work, we propose a new algorithm based on the Conditional Permutation Importance (CPI) method for statistically rigorous variable importance assessment in the context of Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation. Our method termed PermuCATE is agnostic to both the meta-learner and the ML model used. Through theoretical analysis and empirical studies, we show that this approach provides a reliable measure of variable importance and exhibits lower variance compared to the standard Leave-One-Covariate-Out (LOCO) method. We illustrate how this property leads to increased statistical power, which is crucial for the application of explainable ML in small sample sizes or high-dimensional settings. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approach in various simulation scenarios, including previously proposed benchmarks as well as more complex settings with high-dimensional and correlated variables that require advanced CATE estimators.

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