Testing Linear Inequalities of Subgraph Statistics

Property testers are fast randomized algorithms whose task is to distinguish between inputs satisfying some predetermined property ? and those that are far from satisfying it. Since these algorithms operate by inspecting a small randomly selected portion of the input, the most natural property one would like to be able to test is whether the input does not contain certain forbidden small substructures. In the setting of graphs, such a result was obtained by Alon et al., who proved that for any finite family of graphs ?, the property of being induced ?-free (i.e. not containing an induced copy of any F ? ?) is testable. It is natural to ask if one can go one step further and prove that more elaborate properties involving induced subgraphs are also testable. One such generalization of the result of Alon et al. was formulated by Goldreich and Shinkar who conjectured that for any finite family of graphs ?, and any linear inequality involving the densities of the graphs F ? ? in the input graph, the property of satisfying this inequality can be tested in a certain restricted model of graph property testing. Our main result in this paper disproves this conjecture in the following strong form: some properties of this type are not testable even in the classical (i.e. unrestricted) model of graph property testing. The proof deviates significantly from prior non-testability results in this area. The main idea is to use a linear inequality relating induced subgraph densities in order to encode the property of being a pseudo-random graph

The Inflation Technique for Causal Inference with Latent Variables

The problem of causal inference is to determine if a given probability distribution on observed variables is compatible with some causal structure. The difficult case is when the causal structure includes latent variables. We here introduce the $\textit{inflation technique}$ for tackling this problem. An inflation of a causal structure is a new causal structure that can contain multiple copies of each of the original variables, but where the ancestry of each copy mirrors that of the original. To every distribution of the observed variables that is compatible with the original causal structure, we assign a family of marginal distributions on certain subsets of the copies that are compatible with the inflated causal structure. It follows that compatibility constraints for the inflation can be translated into compatibility constraints for the original causal structure. Even if the constraints at the level of inflation are weak, such as observable statistical independences implied by disjoint causal ancestry, the translated constraints can be strong. We apply this method to derive new inequalities whose violation by a distribution witnesses that distribution's incompatibility with the causal structure (of which Bell inequalities and Pearl's instrumental inequality are prominent examples). We describe an algorithm for deriving all such inequalities for the original causal structure that follow from ancestral independences in the inflation. For three observed binary variables with pairwise common causes, it yields inequalities that are stronger in at least some aspects than those obtainable by existing methods. We also describe an algorithm that derives a weaker set of inequalities but is more efficient. Finally, we discuss which inflations are such that the inequalities one obtains from them remain valid even for quantum (and post-quantum) generalizations of the notion of a causal model.Comment: Minor final corrections, updated to match the published version as closely as possibl