  The dramatically growing availability of observational data is being
witnessed in various domains of science and technology, which facilitates the
study of causal inference. However, estimating treatment effects from
observational data is faced with two major challenges, missing counterfactual
outcomes and treatment selection bias. Matching methods are among the most
widely used and fundamental approaches to estimating treatment effects, but
existing matching methods have poor performance when facing data with high
dimensional and complicated variables. We propose a feature selection
representation matching (FSRM) method based on deep representation learning and
matching, which maps the original covariate space into a selective, nonlinear,
and balanced representation space, and then conducts matching in the learned
representation space. FSRM adopts deep feature selection to minimize the
influence of irrelevant variables for estimating treatment effects and
incorporates a regularizer based on the Wasserstein distance to learn balanced
representations. We evaluate the performance of our FSRM method on three
datasets, and the results demonstrate superiority over the state-of-the-art
methods.
