by School by Literature Title by Subject In terms of counterfactuals, Lewis defines a notion of causal dependence between events, which plays a central role in his theory of causation (1973b). The former is the actual observed outcome, whereas the latter is the potential outcome in a world where the treatment was the opposite (counterfactual outcome). for example, that the traffic was particularly heavy on that day . Experiments 4 and 5 . Find Study Resources . As Hernn and Robins point out right at the start of their book, we all have a good intuitive sense of what it means to say that an intervention A causes B. These treatment variables are all contained in one main treatment variable called TREAT which equals 0 for base category 1 for T1, 2 for T2,.,7 for T7. Counterfactual analysis enables evaluators to attribute cause and effect between interventions and outcomes.The 'counterfactual' measures what would have happened to beneficiaries in the absence of the intervention, and impact is estimated by comparing counterfactual outcomes to those observed under the intervention. Using It To Conquer Challenges In Your Life Assumption 1 states that the observed outcome is equal to the counterfactual outcome corresponding to the observed treatment. An example plot of two estimated outcome curves (red and blue dashed lines) and the ground truth (green solid line) for one fixed sample. The unobserved outcome is called the "counterfactual" outcome. Also known as the Rubin causal model (RCM), the potential outcomes framework is based on the idea of potential outcomes. Mathematically, a counterfactual is the following conditional probability: p(^\ast \vert ^\ast = 0, =1, =1, =1, =1), where variables with an $^\ast$ are unobserved (and unobservable) variables that live in the counterfactual world, while variables without $^\ast$ are observable. We also generate an expected counterfactual outcome for each unit, i c f using the same functional form but substituting the counterfactual exposure values for the observed exposure values. For example, Seelau, Seelau, Wells, and Windschitl (1995) argued that people do not consider all counterfactual outcomes and maintained that some counterfactual outcomes may be less available in memory and appear less lucid to people. Clients may need to increase their income or education by some amount to be approved for certain types of loans. It is well known that adversarial examples and counterfactual explanations are based on the same mathematical model. The paper also denes these causal mediation and related effects in terms of counterfactual outcomes and describes the assumptions that are required for unbiased estimation. A counterfactual idea, assumption, or argument. People create counterfactual alternatives that change an exceptional action to be like a usual one (e.g., "if he had placed his usual small bet he would have lost less"), as shown in Experiment 1. For example, a person would have a particular . Counterfactual analysis, on the other hand, uses a methodology to estimate the outcome for an individual who had been exposed to a risk factor (factual) under alternative exposure scenarios (counterfactual) of if the individual had not been exposed. Score: 4.7/5 (49 votes) . Potential outcomes and counterfactuals The first chapter of their book covers the definition of potential outcomes (counterfactuals), individual causal effects, and average causal effects. The treatment valuet1, t2 represent the pseudo-optimal treatment of the estimated outcome curve 1 and 2 respectively, and t represents the true-optimal treatment. There are as many counterfactual outcomes as possible treatment values. When we observe the treated and control units only once before treatment \((t=1)\) and once after treatment \((t=2)\), we write this as: Let Y be the observed outcome (note: no subscript). 24 PDF Some of these examples have well . Furthermore, a causal effect does not have to be a direct effect. According to a 2017 study that pooled a sample of over 13,000 respondents, thoughts about "better outcomes" and regret (upward counterfactual thinking) were associated with current and future . We first discuss causal states and the relationship between potential and observed outcome variables. The outcome that an individual would have experienced if he had received a particular treatment or exposure value. The first will be when it made you feel worse and/or led to a behavior which made your life worse than it had been before. Matching Participants from families with high and low FFSS scores were randomly matched 1:1 based on all covariates. Source: Microsoft Research Blog Examples of counterfactual counterfactual In political science, the task is more difficult, and requires either comparative analysis or the careful use of counterfactual scenarios. Recently, several algorithms have also been proposed to estimate conditional average causal . Consider the examples introduced in Section 1.3. The second will be when it made you feel better and/or led to an improvement in your life. For example, when describing our counterfactual question concerning images in email alerts, potential outcomes take on the following values depending on whether or not individual \textcolor {#EF3E36} {i} i opens a blog post, given the type of email alert they see. This could involve using the baseline as an estimate of the counterfactual where it is reasonable to assume this would have remained the same without the intervention. unrealizedis known as a counterfactual. Making a claim about excess deaths requires causal/counterfactual . This work proposes a novel variational sample re-weighting (VSR) method to eliminate confounding bias by decorrelating the treatments and confounders and conducts extensive experiments to demonstrate that the predictive model trained on this re-weightsed dataset can achieve more accurate counterfactual outcome prediction. . You could push the paramedic out of the way and do the CPR yourself, but you'll likely do a worse job. If you are using continuous variables every other possible value for regressor will create some possible . From the Cambridge English Corpus Counterfactual simulations are also presented to highlight what might happen if things take a different turn. Express assumptions with causal graphs 4. The next simple example will demonstrate both points. Upward. Counterfactual consistency is an unverifiable assumption requiring a subject's potential outcome under the observed exposure value is indeed their observed outcome. Assumption 2 states that there is no unobserved confounding of treatment at any time and any future outcome. For each subject, one of the counterfactual outcomes is actually factualthe one that corresponds to the exposure level or treatment regimen that the subject actually received. If Caesar had been in command in Korea, he would have used catapults. Counterfactual Outcome : . Learners will have the opportunity to apply these methods to example data in R (free statistical software environment). This assumption is more likely to hold when the exposure corresponds to a well-defined intervention [ 32 , 33 , 34 ]. Experiments 2 and 3 eliminated and reversed this well-known effect: An exceptional action is instead changed to an exceptional alternative when it leads to a better outcome. Anna wants to rent out her apartment, but she is not sure how much to charge for it, so she decides to train a machine learning model to predict the rent. All the methods assume a data set with a known covariate set. Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of human thought, enabling the capacity to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative, imagined perspective. We consider three different functional forms for i , and we refer to the different structures as S-1, S-2, and S-3. With continuous variables there are whole sets of counterfactuals that could be infinitely large, if you have just one binary policy there is only a single counterfactuals what would happen if the policy did not get implemented. For example, either of the following statements can be reasonably held true, though not at the same time: [20] If Caesar had been in command in Korea, he would have used the atom bomb. The counterfactuals are obtained by querying the nearest neighbor index built on .fit () for n_neighbors and calculating the average outcome given different values of W. # let us predict counterfactuals for these guys counterfactuals = fecf.predict(X) counterfactuals.head() Then, we can compute treatment effects as follows: Example The following example comes from White, H., Sinha, S., & Flanagan, A. Thus, we can calculate counterfactuals at the cluster level, by comparing the outcome of its elements for different W. .fit () is done when we have a table with counterfactuals by the tree's leaves: # showing . A counterfactual is defined as a statement that is not true. . On the other side, the downward state focuses on . Counterfactual distributions are important ingredients in both decomposition analysis (e.g., Juhn, Murphy, and Pierce, 1993, DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux, 1996, Fortin, Lemieux, and . In the sentence "If dogs had no ears, they could not hear" the statement "if dogs had no ears" is an example of a counterfactual because dogs DO have ears.. What is counterfactual in statistics? Wachter et al. Counterfactual Outcomes of Interest In our example we consider the long run from FINC-GB MISC at New York University The present paper fills this gap. My main objective is to estimate both the observed and counterfactual outcomes of seven treatment variables; T1, T2,.,T7 on income (logincome). and counterfactual marginal distributions of the outcome. Deep Learning of Potential Outcomes. Process tracing can support this analysis at each step of the theory of change. The data provided by a recommender system, for instance, is limited by its observations. for example, it might be possible to show that the development of community infrastructure for raising fish for consumption and sale was directly due to a local project, without being able to confidently state that this would not have happened in the absence of the project (perhaps through an alternative project being implemented by another Mental representations of counterfactual possibilities (e.g., imagined past events or future outcomes not yet at hand) provide the basis for learning from past experience, enable planning and prediction, support creativity . At the end of the course, learners should be able to: 1. 3,4,5 The simulation heuristic explains how our brains are likely to believe things that are easy to picture mentally. Counterfactual assumption (Parallel Trends) A second key assumption we make is that the change in outcomes from pre- to post-intervention in the control group is a good proxy for the counterfactual change in untreated potential outcomes in the treated group. overall economic growth). or the same even if i had been Under the potential outcomes framework for causal inference, the observed outcome is what actually happened, while the counterfactual outcome is what would have happened had a different treatment been assigned. A typical output would be the number of recommended articles a user had downloaded. The first term is a quadratic distance between the . Some of the factors that make the Causal Inference problem challenging are discussed below: Confounders: A Confounder is a variable that influences both the treatment and outcome . treatment success) would not have occurred. first proposed counterfactual explanations in 2017 as an optimisation problem with two terms: L ( x, x , y , ) = ( f ( x ) y ) 2 + D ( x, x ) where x is the counterfactual to the observation x, y is the desired outcome (e.g. There are several types of counterfactual thinking, two of them being the upward and the downward counterfactual thinking. No idea what the world look like in the absence of X 2. Examples of these functionals include distribution functions, quantile functions, quantile e ects . Examples of counterfactual thinking Consider this thought experiment : Someone in front of you drops down unconscious, but fortunately there's a paramedic standing by at the scene. The results of Experiment 1 add to this literature by investigating the moderating effect of uncertainty, and . Non-monotonicity [ edit] Counterfactual analysis has a number of practical uses. The functional theory of counterfactual thinking relies heavily on the functions of "what if" and "if only", components of the emotion of regret. increase in income) is attributable to the impact of the intervention (since such improvement might occur not only due to the intervention but also due to other factors, e.g. For example, in a study of reactions to bets on National Football League games, comments by participants about their losses and wins were coded by judges for counterfactual content; far more counterfactual comments were directed toward losses than toward wins ( Gilovich, 1983, Experiment 1). . Since in real datasets counterfactual outcomes and the degree of time-dependent confounding are not known, we evaluate the CRN on a Pharmacokinetic-Pharmacodynamic model of tumour growth, which uses a state-of-the-art bio-mathematical model to simulate the combined effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer patients . Define causal effects using potential outcomes 2. It has been demonstrated that these counterfactual thoughts serve important adaptive functions, as regret is assumed to facilitate good decision making in children, preceding . Estimated outcome 2 Figure 1. The method of counterfactual impact evaluation allows to identify which part of the observed actual improvement (e.g. Counterfactual thinking can lead to feelings of self-pity, resentment, and difficulty with moving forward beyond said experience. the disentangled counterfactual recurrent network (dcrn) is introduced, a novel sequence-tosequence architecture that estimates treatment outcomes over time by learning representations of patient histories that are disentangled into three separate latent factors: a treatment factor, influencing only treatment selection, an outcome factor, and a The upward state of this type of thinking is when we think at things that could have changed the outcome of an event in better. An example is recommender systems, where counterfactuals can be used to supplement missing information. All possible control variables can become . A meaningful counterfactual constitutes a principally possible condition for individual i at the fixed time of assignment. A counterfactual model of causation like the CSM has to specify a mechanism that realizes the desired counterfactual, and then simulates what the outcome would have been. Counterfactuals are context dependent and vague. The included animation shows what the counterfactual outcomes would be when an individual is in the . An example of this would be getting into a car accident and thinking, "if only I had swerved sooner". (2) Where c and e are two distinct possible events, e causally depends on c if and only if, if c were to occur e would occur; and if c were not to occur e would not occur. 1: Potential outcome if attending catholic school Y 0: Potential outcome if attending public school. caught the train). Di cult to know what to control for 3. Each leaf of the tree determines a cluster of similar elements given the explanatory variables that most impact the target. Potential Outcomes Framework Many studies in social science do not have a clearly de ned counterfactual. For each particular individual, one can generally observe only one, but not both, of the two potential outcomes. A confounder is a variable causing exposure to the risk factors and also outcomes. To overcome it, we establish a new objective of optimizing counterfactual pre-diction on outcome-oriented treatments, propose a novel Outcome-oriented Sample Re-weighting (OOSR) method to make the predictive model concentrate more on outcome-oriented treatments, Abstract. Then: Y = Y Examples from work on the causes of World War I, the nonoccurrence of World War III, social revolutions, the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America, and the origins of fascism and corporatism in Europe illustrate the use, problems and potential of counterfactual argument in small-N-oriented political science research." - Jstor.org Counterfactual Outcomes Example. Upward counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by regret or disappointment. The unobserved outcome is called the "counterfactual" outcome. (2006). While reflection on events that happen in our lives is valuable, our ability to move forward healthily also matters. One Example: Democratic Peace Theory Several problems arise when there is not a clear counterfactual 1. effects from observational data in a counterfactual framework. for example, a person may reflect upon how a car accident could have turned out by imagining how some of the antecedents could have been different, that is by imagining a counterfactual conditional, where the consequence is preceded by the conditional, beginning with "if" e.g., if only i hadn't been speeding. The "if" portion of a counterfactual is called the hypothetical condition, or more often, the antecedent. We use counterfactuals to emphasize our wish to compare two outcomes (e.g., driving times) under the exact same conditions, . A common example and use-case is loan approvals. For example, in a study by Davis et al., parents who suffered the death of an infant were more likely to counterfactual think 15 months later if they felt guilty about the incident or if there were odd circumstances surrounding the mortality. noun. The CSM assumes that people use their intuitive understanding of physics to generate imagined interventions on the scene by imparting a force on a candidate causal object. A potential outcome is the outcome that would be realized if the individual received a specific value of the treatment. For example, after receiving a "B" on an exam, thoughts of how one might instead have gotten an "A" (i.e., an upward counterfactual) makes the "B" seem less satisfying. However, their relationship has not yet been studied at a conceptual level. What are counterfactual outcomes? The fundamental problem of causal inference should now be clear. Counterfactuals are the heart of all historical interpretations and their putative lessons. This means that the model has more uncertainty about the hypothetical outcome (because the block may or may not move) compared to the counterfactual outcome. In this chapter, we introduce the foundational components of the counterfactual model of causality, which is also known as the potential outcome model. yCF is not directly observed, so it . For example, if A = 1 for Zeus, then Ya = 1 = Ya = A = Y for him. Similarly, norm theory describes how we tend to have stronger emotional responses to events with abnormal causes, or events that could have . Upward and Downward Counter-Factual Thinking. For each individual, the value of the counterfactual outcome under the treatment value that the individual actually received equals the observed outcome (a property of counterfactual outcomes known as . Because all confounding was managed by restricting the sample, the statistical relationship between family functioning and ADHD was assessed with a GLM with no covariates. As the condition is not required to be sufficient for the outcome, multiple causal factors are allowed. First, why should population data provide any information whatsoever on the individual response and, second, why should non-experimental data add any information (regarding individual response) to what we can learn with an RCT alone. Excess deaths are defined as: Excess deaths = Reported Deaths noisy measure of actual deaths Expected Deaths unmeasurable counterfactual. ments is large, for example under the continuous treatment setting. One of the principal policy "lessons" of the 1930s was that appeasement whets the appetites of dictators while military capability and resolve restrains them. The controversy surrounding the strategy of deterrence is an example. Describe the difference between association and causation 3. We show that counterfactual reasoning is the common basis of the fields and reliable machine learning their shared goal . Assumption 2 would hold, for example, under the conditions depicted in Figure 1. The actual outcomes of our non-counterfactual conditions mirrored the counterfactual conditions; in two conditions children received the worse prize (one sticker), and in the other two conditions they received the better prize (five stickers). Whereas upward counterfactuals make actual outcomes feel worse (by contrast), downward counterfactuals tend to make outcomes seem more favorable. One of the earliest theoretical explanations of counterfactual thinking as a mental process is the simulation heuristic and norm theory. Practically, we will try to estimate the number of 'excess deaths' since the onset of COVID-19, using data from England and Wales. The new sample included 1900 families. Examples illustrate the ideas behind causal mediation analysis and the applications of the CAUSALMED procedure. For example, for the clip shown in figure 5a, the hypothetical probability is close to 50% (ball B only goes through if the block goes out of the way), whereas the counterfactual . In our second example, we want to explain a model that predicts a continuous outcome with counterfactual explanations. For example, our task could be used to investigate whether an experience of regret over a poor . For example ( 2 ) can be used as part of an argument that the antecedent is true (Anderson 1951): (2) If there had been intensive agriculture in the Pre-Columbian Americas, the natural environment would have been impacted in specific ways. Since there are various ways to reach the same outcome, there can be multiple counterfactuals. The unobserved outcome is a counterfactual one. Causal inference methods employ various assumptions to let us estimate the unobservable counterfactual outcome. 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