{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/counterfactual-generative-models-for-time","title":"Counterfactual Generative Models for Time-Varying Treatments","arxiv_id":"2305.15742","date":"2023-05-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shenghao Wu","Wenbin Zhou","Minshuo Chen","Shixiang Zhu"],"abstract":"Estimating the counterfactual outcome of treatment is essential for decision-making in public health and clinical science, among others. Often, treatments are administered in a sequential, time-varying manner, leading to an exponentially increased number of possible counterfactual outcomes. Furthermore, in modern applications, the outcomes are high-dimensional and conventional average treatment effect estimation fails to capture disparities in individuals. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel conditional generative framework capable of producing counterfactual samples under time-varying treatment, without the need for explicit density estimation. Our method carefully addresses the distribution mismatch between the observed and counterfactual distributions via a loss function based on inverse probability re-weighting, and supports integration with state-of-the-art conditional generative models such as the guided diffusion and conditional variational autoencoder. We present a thorough evaluation of our method using both synthetic and real-world data. Our results demonstrate that our method is capable of generating high-quality counterfactual samples and outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15742v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.15742v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"counterfactual-generative-models-for-time","repo_url":"https://github.com/shenghaowu/counterfactual-generative-models","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"density-estimation","task_name":"Density Estimation"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"},{"method_slug":"test","method_name":"Test"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.15742","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}