Title: Causal Regularization,
Abstract: In application domains such as healthcare, we want accurate predictive models
that are also causally interpretable. In pursuit of such models, we propose a
causal regularizer to steer predictive models towards causally-interpretable
solutions and theoretically study its properties. In a large-scale analysis of
Electronic Health Records (EHR), our causally-regularized model outperforms its
L1-regularized counterpart in causal accuracy and is competitive in predictive
performance. We perform non-linear causality analysis by causally regularizing
a special neural network architecture. We also show that the proposed causal
regularizer can be used together with neural representation learning algorithms
to yield up to 20% improvement over multilayer perceptron in detecting
multivariate causation, a situation common in healthcare, where many causal
factors should occur simultaneously to have an effect on the target variable.