Personalized Interventions to Increase the Employment Success of People With Disability

An emerging problem in Disability Employment Services (DES) is recommending to people with disability the right skill to upgrade and the right upgrade level to achieve maximum improvement in their employment success. This problem requires causal reasoning to estimate the individual causal effect of possible factors on the outcome to determine the most effective intervention. In this paper, we propose a causal graph based framework to solve the intervention recommendation problem for survival outcome (job retention time) and non-survival outcome (employment status). For an individual, a personalized causal graph is predicted for them. It indicates which factors affect the outcome and their causal effects at different intervention levels. Based on the causal graph, we can determine the most effective intervention for an individual, i.e., the one that can generate a maximum outcome increase. Experiments with two case studies show that our framework can help people with disability increase their employment success. Evaluations with public datasets also show the advantage of our framework in other applications.