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Interpretable Subgroup Discovery in Treatment Effect Estimation with Application to Opioid Prescribing Guidelines
The dearth of prescribing guidelines for physicians is one key driver of the
current opioid epidemic in the United States. In this work, we analyze medical
and pharmaceutical claims data to draw insights on characteristics of patients
who are more prone to adverse outcomes after an initial synthetic opioid
prescription. Toward this end, we propose a generative model that allows
discovery from observational data of subgroups that demonstrate an enhanced or
diminished causal effect due to treatment. Our approach models these
sub-populations as a mixture distribution, using sparsity to enhance
interpretability, while jointly learning nonlinear predictors of the potential
outcomes to better adjust for confounding. The approach leads to
human-interpretable insights on discovered subgroups, improving the practical
utility for decision suppor
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