The dearth of prescribing guidelines for physicians is one key driver of the current opioid epidemic in the United States. In this work, we analyze medical and pharmaceutical claims data to draw insights on characteristics of patients who are more prone to adverse outcomes after an initial synthetic opioid prescription. Toward this end, we propose a generative model that allows discovery from observational data of subgroups that demonstrate an enhanced or diminished causal effect due to treatment. Our approach models these sub-populations as a mixture distribution, using sparsity to enhance interpretability, while jointly learning nonlinear predictors of the potential outcomes to better adjust for confounding. The approach leads to human-interpretable insights on discovered subgroups, improving the practical utility for decision support
We introduce a novel generative model for interpretable subgroup analysis for causal inference applications, Causal Rule Sets (CRS). A CRS model uses a small set of short rules to capture a subgroup where the average treatment effect is elevated compared to the entire population. We present a Bayesian framework for learning a causal rule set. The Bayesian framework consists of a prior that favors simpler models and a Bayesian logistic regression that characterizes the relation between outcomes, attributes and subgroup membership. We find maximum a posteriori models using discrete Monte Carlo steps in the joint solution space of rules sets and parameters. We provide theoretically grounded heuristics and bounding strategies to improve search efficiency. Experiments show that the search algorithm can efficiently recover a true underlying subgroup and CRS shows consistently competitive performance compared to other state-of-the-art baseline methods.