{"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/learning-causally-predictable-outcomes-from","title":"Learning Causally Predictable Outcomes from Psychiatric Longitudinal Data","arxiv_id":"2506.16629","date":"2025-06-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eric V. Strobl"],"abstract":"Causal inference in longitudinal biomedical data remains a central challenge, especially in psychiatry, where symptom heterogeneity and latent confounding frequently undermine classical estimators. Most existing methods for treatment effect estimation presuppose a fixed outcome variable and address confounding through observed covariate adjustment. However, the assumption of unconfoundedness may not hold for a fixed outcome in practice. To address this foundational limitation, we directly optimize the outcome definition to maximize causal identifiability. Our DEBIAS (Durable Effects with Backdoor-Invariant Aggregated Symptoms) algorithm learns non-negative, clinically interpretable weights for outcome aggregation, maximizing durable treatment effects and empirically minimizing both observed and latent confounding by leveraging the time-limited direct effects of prior treatments in psychiatric longitudinal data. The algorithm also furnishes an empirically verifiable test for outcome unconfoundedness. DEBIAS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in recovering causal effects for clinically interpretable composite outcomes across comprehensive experiments in depression and schizophrenia.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16629v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16629v1.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":"learning-causally-predictable-outcomes-from","repo_url":"https://github.com/ericstrobl/debias","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"causal-inference","task_name":"Causal Inference"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}