论文标题
第二意见的反事实推断
Counterfactual Inference of Second Opinions
论文作者
论文摘要
能够从专家推断第二意见的自动决策支持系统可能有助于更有效地分配资源;他们可以帮助决定何时何地寻求第二意见。在本文中,我们从反事实推断的角度研究了这种类型的支持系统的设计。我们专注于多类分类设置,并首先表明,如果专家自行做出预测,那么产生预测的基本因果机制就需要满足理想的设定不变属性。此外,我们表明,对于满足该特性的任何因果机制,存在一种等效的机制,其中每个专家的预测是由由共同噪声控制的独立亚机制产生的。这激发了设定不变的gumbel-max结构因果模型的设计,其中管理模型的亚机制的噪声结构取决于专家之间相似性的直觉概念,可以从数据中估算。合成数据和真实数据的实验表明,我们的模型可用于比其非伴侣对应物更准确地推断第二个意见。
Automated decision support systems that are able to infer second opinions from experts can potentially facilitate a more efficient allocation of resources; they can help decide when and from whom to seek a second opinion. In this paper, we look at the design of this type of support systems from the perspective of counterfactual inference. We focus on a multiclass classification setting and first show that, if experts make predictions on their own, the underlying causal mechanism generating their predictions needs to satisfy a desirable set invariant property. Further, we show that, for any causal mechanism satisfying this property, there exists an equivalent mechanism where the predictions by each expert are generated by independent sub-mechanisms governed by a common noise. This motivates the design of a set invariant Gumbel-Max structural causal model where the structure of the noise governing the sub-mechanisms underpinning the model depends on an intuitive notion of similarity between experts which can be estimated from data. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that our model can be used to infer second opinions more accurately than its non-causal counterpart.