Barycentric Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Balancing for Causal Inference under Multiple Treatments
TL;DR
The Causal Inference for Heterogeneous Single and Interaction Treatment Effects Network (CIHSI-Net) is proposed, a deep learning framework built on a novel Barycentric Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Balancing objective that consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and demonstrates its practical utility in complex multi-treatment scenarios.
Abstract
Estimating heterogeneous single and interaction treatment effects from observational data under multiple simultaneous treatments is crucial for decision-making. To mitigate estimation variance, previous studies balance representation distributions between every pair of treatment patterns. However, such pairwise balancing scales quadratically with the number of treatment patterns and fails to preserve consistent local proximity structures across patterns, which degrades counterfactual estimation. To address these challenges, we propose the Causal Inference for Heterogeneous Single and Interaction Treatment Effects Network (CIHSI-Net), a deep learning framework built on a novel Barycentric Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Balancing (BFG-WB) objective. BFG-WB aligns the representation distribution of each treatment pattern with a shared Wasserstein barycenter, achieving global alignment while reducing the computational complexity from quadratic to linear, and its Fused Gromov-Wasserstein discrepancy preserves the local proximity structures essential for reliable heterogeneous effect estimation. Simulation studies show that CIHSI-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and an application to real-world marketing data demonstrates its practical utility in complex multi-treatment scenarios.