Learning Causal Effects on Hypergraphs (Extended Abstract)

Learning Causal Effects on Hypergraphs (Extended Abstract)

Jing Ma, Mengting Wan, Longqi Yang, Jundong Li, Brent Hecht, Jaime Teevan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Sister Conferences Best Papers. Pages 6463-6467. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/721

Hypergraphs provide an effective abstraction for modeling multi-way group interactions among nodes, where each hyperedge can connect any number of nodes. Different from most existing studies which leverage statistical dependencies, we study hypergraphs from the perspective of causality. Specifically, we focus on the problem of individual treatment effect (ITE) estimation on hypergraphs, aiming to estimate how much an intervention (e.g., wearing face covering) would causally affect an outcome (e.g., COVID-19 infection) of each individual node. Existing works on ITE estimation either assume that the outcome of one individual should not be influenced by the treatment of other individuals (i.e., no interference), or assume the interference only exists between connected individuals in an ordinary graph. We argue that these assumptions can be unrealistic on real-world hypergraphs, where higher-order interference can affect the ITE estimations due to group interactions. We investigate high-order interference modeling, and propose a new causality learning framework powered by hypergraph neural networks. Extensive experiments on real-world hypergraphs verify the superiority of our framework over existing baselines.
Keywords:
Sister Conferences Best Papers: Data Mining
Sister Conferences Best Papers: Machine Learning