2,302 research outputs found
Structural Agnostic Modeling: Adversarial Learning of Causal Graphs
A new causal discovery method, Structural Agnostic Modeling (SAM), is
presented in this paper. Leveraging both conditional independencies and
distributional asymmetries in the data, SAM aims at recovering full causal
models from continuous observational data along a multivariate non-parametric
setting. The approach is based on a game between players estimating each
variable distribution conditionally to the others as a neural net, and an
adversary aimed at discriminating the overall joint conditional distribution,
and that of the original data. An original learning criterion combining
distribution estimation, sparsity and acyclicity constraints is used to enforce
the end-to-end optimization of the graph structure and parameters through
stochastic gradient descent. Besides the theoretical analysis of the approach
in the large sample limit, SAM is extensively experimentally validated on
synthetic and real data
Causal Discovery with Continuous Additive Noise Models
We consider the problem of learning causal directed acyclic graphs from an
observational joint distribution. One can use these graphs to predict the
outcome of interventional experiments, from which data are often not available.
We show that if the observational distribution follows a structural equation
model with an additive noise structure, the directed acyclic graph becomes
identifiable from the distribution under mild conditions. This constitutes an
interesting alternative to traditional methods that assume faithfulness and
identify only the Markov equivalence class of the graph, thus leaving some
edges undirected. We provide practical algorithms for finitely many samples,
RESIT (Regression with Subsequent Independence Test) and two methods based on
an independence score. We prove that RESIT is correct in the population setting
and provide an empirical evaluation
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