Counterfactual data augmentation has recently emerged as a method to mitigate
confounding biases in the training data for a machine learning model. These
biases, such as spurious correlations, arise due to various observed and
unobserved confounding variables in the data generation process. In this paper,
we formally analyze how confounding biases impact downstream classifiers and
present a causal viewpoint to the solutions based on counterfactual data
augmentation. We explore how removing confounding biases serves as a means to
learn invariant features, ultimately aiding in generalization beyond the
observed data distribution. Additionally, we present a straightforward yet
powerful algorithm for generating counterfactual images, which effectively
mitigates the influence of confounding effects on downstream classifiers.
Through experiments on MNIST variants and the CelebA datasets, we demonstrate
the effectiveness and practicality of our approach.

本研究提出了利用反事实数据扩充改善机器学习模型中混淆偏差的方法，并探讨了混淆偏差如何影响下游分类器以及基于反事实数据增强的解决方案。另外，我们还介绍了一种生成反事实图片的算法，并在 MNIST 变量和 CelebA 数据集上进行实验，证明了我们的方法的有效性和实用性。