Causal Inference Under Unmeasured Confounding With Negative Controls: A Minimax Learning Approach

Abstract: We study the estimation of causal parameters when not all confounders are observed and instead negative controls are available. Recent work has shown how these can enable identification and efficient estimation via two so-called bridge functions. In this paper, we tackle the primary challenge to causal inference using negative controls: the identification and estimation of these bridge functions. Previous work has relied on uniqueness and completeness assumptions on these functions that may be implausible in practice and also focused on their parametric estimation. Instead, we provide a new identification strategy that avoids both uniqueness and completeness. And, we provide a new estimators for these functions based on minimax learning formulations. These estimators accommodate general function classes such as reproducing Hilbert spaces and neural networks. We study finite-sample convergence results both for estimating bridge function themselves and for the final estimation of the causal parameter. We do this under a variety of combinations of assumptions that include realizability and closedness conditions on the hypothesis and critic classes employed in the minimax estimator. Depending on how much we are willing to assume, we obtain different convergence rates. In some cases, we show the estimate for the causal parameter may converge even when our bridge function estimators do not converge to any valid bridge function. And, in other cases, we show we can obtain semiparametric efficiency.