The Challenges of Hyperparameter Tuning for Accurate Causal Effect Estimation

Abstract ML is playing an increasingly crucial role in estimating causal effects of treatments on outcomes from observational data. Many ML methods (‘causal estimators’) have been proposed for this task. All of these methods, as with any ML approach, require extensive hyperparameter tuning. For non-causal predictive tasks, there is a consensus on the choice of tuning metrics (e.g. mean squared error), making it simple to compare models. However, for causal inference tasks, such a consensus is yet to be reached, making a any comparison of causal models difficult. On top of that, there is no ideal metric on which to tune causal estimators, so one must rely on proxies. Furthermore, the fact that model selection in causal inference involves multiple components (causal estimator, ML regressor, hyperparameters, metric), complicates the issue even further. In order to evaluate the importance of each component, we perform an extensive empirical study on their combination. Our experimental setup involves many commonly used causal estimators, regressors (‘base learners’ henceforth) and metrics applied to four well-known causal inference benchmark datasets. Our results show that hyperparameter tuning increased the probability of reaching state-of-the-art performance in average ( $$65\% {\rightarrow } 81\%$$ ) and individualised ( $$50\% {\rightarrow } 57\%$$ ) effect estimation with only commonly used estimators. We also show that the performance of standard metrics can be inconsistent across different scenarios. Our findings highlight the need for further research to establish whether metrics uniformly capable of state-of-the-art performance in causal model evaluation can be found.