Syy-seuraustietoinen ennustajavalinta ympäristöön mukautumiseen

Despite development in many areas of machine learning in recent decades, still, changing data sources between the domain in a model is trained and the domain in the same model is used for predictions is a fundamental and common problem. In the area of domain adaptation, these circum- stances have been studied by incorporating causal knowledge about the information flow between features to be utilized in the feature selection for the model. That work has shown promising results to accomplish so-called invariant causal prediction, which means a prediction performance is immune to the change levels between domains. Within these approaches, recognizing the Markov blanket to the target variable has served as a principal workhorse to find the optimal starting point. In this thesis, we continue to investigate closely the property of invariant prediction performance within Markov blankets to target variable. Also, some scenarios with latent parents involved in the Markov blanket are included to understand the role of the related covariates around the latent parent effect to the invariant prediction properties. Before the experiments, we cover the concepts of Makov blankets, structural causal models, causal feature selection, covariate shift, and target shift. We also look into ways to measure bias between changing domains by introducing transfer bias and incomplete information bias, as these biases play an important role in the feature selection, often being a trade-off situation between these biases. In the experiments, simulated data sets are generated from structural causal models to conduct the testing scenarios with the changing conditions of interest. With different scenarios, we investigate changes in the features of Markov blankets between training and prediction domains. Some scenarios involve changes in latent covariates as well. As result, we show that parent features are generally steady predictors enabling invariant prediction. An exception is a changing target, which basically requires more information about the changes in other earlier domains to enable invariant prediction. Also, emerging with latent parents, it is important to have some real direct causes in the feature sets to achieve invariant prediction performance

A review of domain adaptation without target labels

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Identifiability and transportability in dynamic causal networks

In this paper we propose a causal analog to the purely observational Dynamic Bayesian Networks, which we call Dynamic Causal Networks. We provide a sound and complete algorithm for identification of Dynamic Causal Networks, namely, for computing the effect of an intervention or experiment, based on passive observations only, whenever possible. We note the existence of two types of confounder variables that affect in substantially different ways the identification procedures, a distinction with no analog in either Dynamic Bayesian Networks or standard causal graphs. We further propose a procedure for the transportability of causal effects in Dynamic Causal Network settings, where the result of causal experiments in a source domain may be used for the identification of causal effects in a target domain.Preprin