Orthogonal Representation Learning for Estimating Causal Quantities

Representation learning is widely used for estimating causal quantities (e.g., the conditional average treatment effect) from observational data. While existing representation learning methods have the benefit of allowing for end-to-end learning, they do not have favorable theoretical properties of Neyman-orthogonal learners, such as double robustness and quasi-oracle efficiency. Also, such representation learning methods often employ additional constraints, like balancing, which may even lead to inconsistent estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel class of Neyman-orthogonal learners for causal quantities defined at the representation level, which we call OR-learners. Our OR-learners have several practical advantages: they allow for consistent estimation of causal quantities based on any learned representation, while offering favorable theoretical properties including double robustness and quasi-oracle efficiency. In multiple experiments, we show that, under certain regularity conditions, our OR-learners improve existing representation learning methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our OR-learners are the first work to offer a unified framework of representation learning methods and Neyman-orthogonal learners for causal quantities estimation.

Recommended citation:

@article{melnychuk2025orthogonal,
  title={Orthogonal representation learning for estimating causal quantities},
  author={Melnychuk, Valentyn and Frauen, Dennis and Schweisthal, Jonas and Feuerriegel, Stefan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.04274},
  year={2025}
}