4 research outputs found
Learning Linear Causal Representations from Interventions under General Nonlinear Mixing
We study the problem of learning causal representations from unknown, latent
interventions in a general setting, where the latent distribution is Gaussian
but the mixing function is completely general. We prove strong identifiability
results given unknown single-node interventions, i.e., without having access to
the intervention targets. This generalizes prior works which have focused on
weaker classes, such as linear maps or paired counterfactual data. This is also
the first instance of causal identifiability from non-paired interventions for
deep neural network embeddings. Our proof relies on carefully uncovering the
high-dimensional geometric structure present in the data distribution after a
non-linear density transformation, which we capture by analyzing quadratic
forms of precision matrices of the latent distributions. Finally, we propose a
contrastive algorithm to identify the latent variables in practice and evaluate
its performance on various tasks.Comment: 38 page
Learning nonparametric latent causal graphs with unknown interventions
We establish conditions under which latent causal graphs are
nonparametrically identifiable and can be reconstructed from unknown
interventions in the latent space. Our primary focus is the identification of
the latent structure in measurement models without parametric assumptions such
as linearity or Gaussianity. Moreover, we do not assume the number of hidden
variables is known, and we show that at most one unknown intervention per
hidden variable is needed. This extends a recent line of work on learning
causal representations from observations and interventions. The proofs are
constructive and introduce two new graphical concepts -- imaginary subsets and
isolated edges -- that may be useful in their own right. As a matter of
independent interest, the proofs also involve a novel characterization of the
limits of edge orientations within the equivalence class of DAGs induced by
unknown interventions. These are the first results to characterize the
conditions under which causal representations are identifiable without making
any parametric assumptions in a general setting with unknown interventions and
without faithfulness.Comment: To appear at NeurIPS 202