Causality - Exploiting Multi-Modal Data

Abstract

Massive data collection holds the promise of a better understanding of complex phenomena and ultimately, of better decisions. Representation learning has become a key driver of deep learning applications, since it allows learning latent spaces that capture important properties of the data without requiring any supervised annotations. While representation learning has been hugely successful in predictive tasks, it can fail miserably in causal tasks including predicting the effect of an intervention. This calls for a marriage between representation learning and causal inference. An exciting opportunity in this regard stems from the growing availability of multi-modal and interventional data (in medicine, advertisement, education, etc.). However, these datasets are still miniscule compared to the action spaces of interest in these applications (e.g. interventions can take on continuous values like the dose of a drug or can be combinatorial as in combinatorial drug therapies). In this talk, we will present a statistical and computational framework for causal representation learning from multi-modal data and its application towards optimal intervention design.