Characterization and Greedy Learning of Gaussian Structural Causal Models under Unknown Interventions

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Hauptverfasser: Gamella, Juan L., Taeb, Armeen, Heinze-Deml, Christina, Bühlmann, Peter
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Gamella, Juan L.
Taeb, Armeen
Heinze-Deml, Christina
Bühlmann, Peter
author_facet Gamella, Juan L.
Taeb, Armeen
Heinze-Deml, Christina
Bühlmann, Peter
contents We consider the problem of recovering the causal structure underlying observations from different experimental conditions when the targets of the interventions in each experiment are unknown. We assume a linear structural causal model with additive Gaussian noise and consider interventions that perturb their targets while maintaining the causal relationships in the system. Different models may entail the same distributions, offering competing causal explanations for the given observations. We fully characterize this equivalence class and offer identifiability results, which we use to derive a greedy algorithm called GnIES to recover the equivalence class of the data-generating model without knowledge of the intervention targets. In addition, we develop a novel procedure to generate semi-synthetic data sets with known causal ground truth but distributions closely resembling those of a real data set of choice. We leverage this procedure and evaluate the performance of GnIES on an array of synthetic and semi-synthetic data sets, and real data from a biological system and a tightly controlled physical system. We provide, in the Python packages gnies and sempler, implementations of GnIES and our semi-synthetic data generation procedure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_14897
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Characterization and Greedy Learning of Gaussian Structural Causal Models under Unknown Interventions
Gamella, Juan L.
Taeb, Armeen
Heinze-Deml, Christina
Bühlmann, Peter
Methodology
Computation
Machine Learning
We consider the problem of recovering the causal structure underlying observations from different experimental conditions when the targets of the interventions in each experiment are unknown. We assume a linear structural causal model with additive Gaussian noise and consider interventions that perturb their targets while maintaining the causal relationships in the system. Different models may entail the same distributions, offering competing causal explanations for the given observations. We fully characterize this equivalence class and offer identifiability results, which we use to derive a greedy algorithm called GnIES to recover the equivalence class of the data-generating model without knowledge of the intervention targets. In addition, we develop a novel procedure to generate semi-synthetic data sets with known causal ground truth but distributions closely resembling those of a real data set of choice. We leverage this procedure and evaluate the performance of GnIES on an array of synthetic and semi-synthetic data sets, and real data from a biological system and a tightly controlled physical system. We provide, in the Python packages gnies and sempler, implementations of GnIES and our semi-synthetic data generation procedure.
title Characterization and Greedy Learning of Gaussian Structural Causal Models under Unknown Interventions
topic Methodology
Computation
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14897