English

Causal Matrix Completion under Multiple Treatments via Mixed Synthetic Nearest Neighbors

Machine Learning 2026-03-13 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.11942,
  title  = {Causal Matrix Completion under Multiple Treatments via Mixed Synthetic Nearest Neighbors},
  author = {Minrui Luo and Zhiheng Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.11942},
  year   = {2026}
}