Collaborative representations for targeted causal inference under outcome selection

Abstract

Estimating causal effects with missing outcomes requires learning outcome, exposure, and selection models. Flexible propensity learners can predict treatment or missingness well while worsening target estimation by emphasizing instruments, weak-overlap regions, or variation unrelated to outcome-regression bias. We propose a collaborative representation-based targeted learning method for recovered average treatment effects under outcome selection. The method learns low-dimensional exposure and selection representations from cross-fitted pseudo-outcomes that encode outcome-regression drift. A finite candidate library alternates targeted outcome updates with representation updates, and inner cross-validation selects representation complexity, collaboration strength, and regularization using a target-aware risk. We give high-level sufficient conditions for collaborative robustness, consistency, and asymptotic linearity after outer validation-fold targeting. Simulations show finite-sample bias reduction, with explicit bias-variance trade-offs across configurations and relative to competing estimators

Published in ECML PKDD 2026, LNCS 16941, pp. 623-640. Publisher version: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-37654-1_36

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