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Auteurs principaux: da Silva, Tiago, Bazaluk, Bruna, da Silva, Eliezer de Souza, Góis, António, Lahlou, Salem, Heider, Dominik, Kaski, Samuel, Mesquita, Diego, Ribeiro, Adèle Helena
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12032
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author da Silva, Tiago
Bazaluk, Bruna
da Silva, Eliezer de Souza
Góis, António
Lahlou, Salem
Heider, Dominik
Kaski, Samuel
Mesquita, Diego
Ribeiro, Adèle Helena
author_facet da Silva, Tiago
Bazaluk, Bruna
da Silva, Eliezer de Souza
Góis, António
Lahlou, Salem
Heider, Dominik
Kaski, Samuel
Mesquita, Diego
Ribeiro, Adèle Helena
contents Causal discovery (CD) is an important component of many scientific applications, yet most techniques produce unreliable point estimates that often contradict expert knowledge. To mitigate this, recent research has focused on ex-ante incorporation of background knowledge into the CD process, typically under an unrealistic causal sufficiency assumption. When probing experts is costly (e.g., hidden behind expensive LLM APIs), however, ex-post model refinement that maximizes query utility is preferable. Also, when independent experts provide conflicting but better-than-random feedback, a principled aggregation method is required. In this context, we introduce the first CD algorithm that enables (i) distributional inference over ancestral graphs (AGs), which represent causal systems under latent confounding, and (ii) integration of both ex-ante and uncertain ex-post expert knowledge. Briefly, our method is a diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithm, termed Ancestral GFlowNet (AGFN), whose policy we iteratively refine based on a Bayesian model of the noisy expert feedback. Importantly, we prove convergence to the true AG given sufficiently accurate responses. Through validation on synthetic and realistic datasets using simulated humans and LLMs, we show AGFN is competitive with or superior to strong baselines in terms of structural Hamming distance and Bayesian Information Criterion.
format Preprint
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publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expert-Aided Causal Discovery of Ancestral Graphs
da Silva, Tiago
Bazaluk, Bruna
da Silva, Eliezer de Souza
Góis, António
Lahlou, Salem
Heider, Dominik
Kaski, Samuel
Mesquita, Diego
Ribeiro, Adèle Helena
Machine Learning
Causal discovery (CD) is an important component of many scientific applications, yet most techniques produce unreliable point estimates that often contradict expert knowledge. To mitigate this, recent research has focused on ex-ante incorporation of background knowledge into the CD process, typically under an unrealistic causal sufficiency assumption. When probing experts is costly (e.g., hidden behind expensive LLM APIs), however, ex-post model refinement that maximizes query utility is preferable. Also, when independent experts provide conflicting but better-than-random feedback, a principled aggregation method is required. In this context, we introduce the first CD algorithm that enables (i) distributional inference over ancestral graphs (AGs), which represent causal systems under latent confounding, and (ii) integration of both ex-ante and uncertain ex-post expert knowledge. Briefly, our method is a diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithm, termed Ancestral GFlowNet (AGFN), whose policy we iteratively refine based on a Bayesian model of the noisy expert feedback. Importantly, we prove convergence to the true AG given sufficiently accurate responses. Through validation on synthetic and realistic datasets using simulated humans and LLMs, we show AGFN is competitive with or superior to strong baselines in terms of structural Hamming distance and Bayesian Information Criterion.
title Expert-Aided Causal Discovery of Ancestral Graphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12032