Causal Inference Meets Machine Learning

Causal inference has numerous real-world applications in many domains such as health care, marketing, political science and online advertising. Treatment effect estimation, a fundamental problem in causal inference, has been extensively studied in statistics for decades. However, traditional treatment effect estimation methods may not well handle large-scale and high-dimensional heterogeneous data. In recent years, an emerging research direction has attracted increasing attention in the broad artificial intelligence field, which combines the advantages of traditional treatment effect estimation approaches (e.g., matching estimators) and advanced representation learning approaches (e.g., deep neural networks). In this tutorial, we will introduce both traditional and state-of-the-art representation learning algorithms for treatment effect estimation. Background about causal inference, counterfactuals and matching estimators will be covered as well. We will also showcase promising applications of these methods in different application domains.