Generative Synthetic Data for Causal Inference: Pitfalls, Remedies, and Opportunities
用于因果推断的生成式合成数据:陷阱、补救与机会
Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference. We show that fully generative tabular synthesizers, including GAN- and LLM-based models, can preserve predictive utility while distorting average treatment effect (ATE) estimates. The failure is structural: ATE preservation requires both a realistic covariate law…