Papers › Using Embeddings to Correct for Unobserved Confounding in Networks

Using Embeddings to Correct for Unobserved Confounding in Networks

11 Feb 2019NeurIPS 2019 12arXiv:1902.04114archive 2025-07-28

Victor Veitch, Yixin Wang, David M. Blei

We consider causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. We study the case where a proxy is available for the unobserved confounding in the form of a network connecting the units. For example, the link structure of a social network carries information about its members. We show how to effectively use the proxy to do causal inference. The main idea is to reduce the causal estimation problem to a semi-supervised prediction of both the treatments and outcomes. Networks admit high-quality embedding models that can be used for this semi-supervised prediction. We show that the method yields valid inferences under suitable (weak) conditions on the quality of the predictive model. We validate the method with experiments on a semi-synthetic social network dataset. Code is available at github.com/vveitch/causal-network-embeddings.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

vveitch/causal-embeddings officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
vveitch/causal-network-embeddings officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Causal Inference

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Causal inference

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections