2 research outputs found
Meta Learning for Causal Direction
The inaccessibility of controlled randomized trials due to inherent
constraints in many fields of science has been a fundamental issue in causal
inference. In this paper, we focus on distinguishing the cause from effect in
the bivariate setting under limited observational data. Based on recent
developments in meta learning as well as in causal inference, we introduce a
novel generative model that allows distinguishing cause and effect in the small
data setting. Using a learnt task variable that contains distributional
information of each dataset, we propose an end-to-end algorithm that makes use
of similar training datasets at test time. We demonstrate our method on various
synthetic as well as real-world data and show that it is able to maintain high
accuracy in detecting directions across varying dataset sizes
Distinguishing between cause and effect via kernel-based complexity measures for conditional distributions
We propose a method to evaluate the complexity of probability measures from data that is based on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space seminorm of the logarithm of conditional probability densities. The motivation is to provide a tool for a causal inference method which assumes that conditional probabilities for effects given their causes are typically simpler and smoother than vice-versa. We present experiments with toy data where the quantitative results are consistent with our intuitive understanding of complexity and smoothness. Also in some examples with real-world data the probability measure corresponding to the true causal direction turned out to be less complex than those of the reversed order