ICML 2026poster0 citations

Causal Matrix Completion under Multiple Treatments via Mixed Synthetic Nearest Neighbors

Minrui Luo, Zhiheng Zhang

Abstract

Synthetic Nearest Neighbors (SNN) provides a principled solution to causal matrix completion under missing-not-at-random (MNAR) by exploiting local low-rank structure through fully observed anchor submatrices. However, its effectiveness critically relies on sufficient data availability within each treatment level, a condition that often fails in settings with multiple or complex treatments. In this work, we propose Mixed Synthetic Nearest Neighbors (MSNN), a new entry-wise causal identification estimator that integrates information across treatment levels. We show that MSNN retains the finite-sample error bounds and asymptotic normality guarantees of SNN, while enlarging the effective sample size available for estimation. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, especially under data-scarce treatment levels.

TheoryCausalityRetrievalBenchmark
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
luo2026causal,
title={Causal Matrix Completion under Multiple Treatments via Mixed Synthetic Nearest Neighbors},
author={Minrui Luo and Zhiheng Zhang},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=Ir6N7U5Kea}
}