End-to-End Balancing for Causal Continuous Treatment-Effect Estimation

We study the problem of observational causal inference with continuous treatment. We focus on the challenge of estimating the causal response curve for infrequently-observed treatment values. We design a new algorithm based on the framework of entropy balancing which learns weights that directly maximize causal inference accuracy using end-to-end optimization. Our weights can be customized for different datasets and causal inference algorithms. We propose a new theory for consistency of entropy balancing for continuous treatments. Using synthetic and real-world data, we show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the entropy balancing in terms of causal inference accuracy.