Causal Component Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wendong, Liang, Kekić, Armin, von Kügelgen, Julius, Buchholz, Simon, Besserve, Michel, Gresele, Luigi, Schölkopf, Bernhard
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Wendong, Liang
Kekić, Armin
von Kügelgen, Julius
Buchholz, Simon
Besserve, Michel
Gresele, Luigi
Schölkopf, Bernhard
author_facet Wendong, Liang
Kekić, Armin
von Kügelgen, Julius
Buchholz, Simon
Besserve, Michel
Gresele, Luigi
Schölkopf, Bernhard
contents Independent Component Analysis (ICA) aims to recover independent latent variables from observed mixtures thereof. Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims instead to infer causally related (thus often statistically dependent) latent variables, together with the unknown graph encoding their causal relationships. We introduce an intermediate problem termed Causal Component Analysis (CauCA). CauCA can be viewed as a generalization of ICA, modelling the causal dependence among the latent components, and as a special case of CRL. In contrast to CRL, it presupposes knowledge of the causal graph, focusing solely on learning the unmixing function and the causal mechanisms. Any impossibility results regarding the recovery of the ground truth in CauCA also apply for CRL, while possibility results may serve as a stepping stone for extensions to CRL. We characterize CauCA identifiability from multiple datasets generated through different types of interventions on the latent causal variables. As a corollary, this interventional perspective also leads to new identifiability results for nonlinear ICA -- a special case of CauCA with an empty graph -- requiring strictly fewer datasets than previous results. We introduce a likelihood-based approach using normalizing flows to estimate both the unmixing function and the causal mechanisms, and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive synthetic experiments in the CauCA and ICA setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_17225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Component Analysis
Wendong, Liang
Kekić, Armin
von Kügelgen, Julius
Buchholz, Simon
Besserve, Michel
Gresele, Luigi
Schölkopf, Bernhard
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Independent Component Analysis (ICA) aims to recover independent latent variables from observed mixtures thereof. Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims instead to infer causally related (thus often statistically dependent) latent variables, together with the unknown graph encoding their causal relationships. We introduce an intermediate problem termed Causal Component Analysis (CauCA). CauCA can be viewed as a generalization of ICA, modelling the causal dependence among the latent components, and as a special case of CRL. In contrast to CRL, it presupposes knowledge of the causal graph, focusing solely on learning the unmixing function and the causal mechanisms. Any impossibility results regarding the recovery of the ground truth in CauCA also apply for CRL, while possibility results may serve as a stepping stone for extensions to CRL. We characterize CauCA identifiability from multiple datasets generated through different types of interventions on the latent causal variables. As a corollary, this interventional perspective also leads to new identifiability results for nonlinear ICA -- a special case of CauCA with an empty graph -- requiring strictly fewer datasets than previous results. We introduce a likelihood-based approach using normalizing flows to estimate both the unmixing function and the causal mechanisms, and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive synthetic experiments in the CauCA and ICA setting.
title Causal Component Analysis
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17225